a question formed in my mind the other day: the servers for BOINC projects work really hard part of the time, and slacken off other parts of the time. This is inevitable given the statistical (or is it stochastic?) nature of the load, with clients returning data essentially at random.

So in all those slack times, wouldn\'t it be nice if the server was running BOINC. The logic is the same for a server as for any other computer, as far as I can see. (Maybe I\'m wrong: if so tell me why please).

There may be good reasons *not* to run your own project on one of its servers, the close access of the server and client is atypical and some obscure failure modes might make this a problem.

So, my suggestion is that BOINC servers could run each other\'s clients. A token contribution to BOINCland of the same kind that all the donors are making?

After all the BOINC client will duck nicely (nice=19) out of the way whenever a data packet needs attention, just as it does on any other machine. And falling stats for your contrib to other projects might be a useful alert to server saturation...

I've done it before and they all coexisted fine; I'm not doing it right now, but once things settle down (i.e. I can return to the UK a legal working member of society ;-) I may set it up again. my main worry was beating the disks on the servers, but if I find a spare IDE or SCSI drive I may pop it in and just use boinc on that (to keep the I/O off the main SCSI RAID systems on the servers etc).