On Sunday 03 April 2005 14:01, Oliver Gretz wrote: > I've just the question if it is possible that mprime can cause a > damaged partition
Directly, no. Indirectly, if the system is overstressed - most likely by CPU or memory overheating - anything is possible. The point is that mprime _does_ stress the CPU and memory subsystem. I've run mprime on lots of systems for several years and _never_ had a partition damaged, except for a couple of totally failed hard disks - one was apparently completely dead, no signs of life whatsoever, the other was spinning up the platters but not reacting to any commands at all. Bearing in mind the advertised MTBF of the drives, this is just about what I'd expect, whatever software was running on the systems. Mind you I overclock very conservatively - if at all - and always make sure that my systems are properly cooled - CPU operating temperatures, under stress from mprime, 10C or more below the manufacturer's limit (that way I don't suffer from thermal throttling either, whilst failure of a cooling fan would probably affect performance but not be catastrophic). I use Zalman CPU heat sinks rather than those bundled in retail packs as they're more efficient and significantly quieter, and I use Arctic Silver thermal transfer compound instead of the sticky pads often fitted to heat sinks as it seems to reduce the running temperature by several degrees and be more reliable in the long term - provided it's used properly (very thin but even film over whole area, no air bubbles in the joint). > because mprime actually don't need any disc space for > the computation Well, actually, it periodically writes a save file - several megabytes in size. I think the default is every half hour. > Could it be a problem of Vmware ESX because it is > optimized for server consolidation and not for computations in this extent? Pass, but I doubt it. Doesn't VMware just act as an extra layer arbitrating time slicing and memory allocation, leaving I/O to be done by the hosted operating systems? Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
