Why would you crunch a project if you don't know what its purpose is, or what it's doing with your computer?

What part of FREE CREDIT don't you Understand ... ... Obviously you missed the big hullabaloo over there when they were crying to get Credit for not even running the Wu's if the Sever was Down ...

I crunch a project if I know reasonably its purpose and if I like it, if results are free to use, if a project is alive, if I trust in those supporting it (SETI.Germany)... there are a lot of reasons

this doesn't mean I know everything about that project

in this case I don't know why it is non CPU intensive (this is not my only failure obviously )

I get the feeling this project is non cpu-intensive just to get people to run it; if it was not, the work units would run for 3 minutes each and could not reasonably be granted 12 credits.
However I have absolutely no evidence to back this up!

Needless to say, I've stopped crunching for this project until I know what it's actually doing...

I think it does some kind of knowledge data(base) conversion for an (open source?) conversation simulator called FreeHal*:



As I understand it there are free knowledge bases available on the internet that are converted for the use with Freehal. This is done via a boinc project.

*There is a well known competition for this kind of applications, the Loebner Prize.

I do have evidence. I looked at the source code. It's non-cpu-intensive because every loop has calls to a be_slow() function, which just sleeps.

The WU I tested (long ago; things might have changed now) took six seconds of real CPU time.

6 seconds - reported by boinc?

it's pretty easy to produce "something" which reprts like that but uses 59 seconds CPU-time in 60 seconds wall-time. you'd call that "non-cpu-intensive" because that rocket science thing tells you?

get serious - there is no such thing as free lunch...

The project calls itself non-CPU-intensive (it's not *me* who decided to call it that), and the app uses less than 1% CPU, and runs at the same time as other projects.

But I removed the be_slow function and ran the workunit manually, and it took 6 seconds to finish.

You could also look at the "CPU time" column of Windows's Task Manager right before the workunit ends.