My first question would be what does he mean by "node", as in "to reassign a work unit to the more idle node"?
Nodes in HPC mean when you have say 4 nodes within a single server, and each node has its own CPU, RAM, HD, etc. But power, fans, etc are all provided as a whole via the server. It would then be called a 4-node server, e.g.:
This is obviously not what he means so its a bit unclear exactly what "I can temporarily resolve this by using the "set affinity" feature in Task Manager to reassign a work unit to the more idle
node, but its not long before one or other of the CPU's is short of work again".
Also the only thing I could find about BOINC Affinity was related to NUMA, and I don't think this is of any relevance either:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_th ... p?id=10124
Forgetting both of these, It does sound pretty strange though. About the only time that I have seen BM act pretty erratic is when it comes down to tasks not being able to finish in time, but that case the last thing you would expect is for BM to *not fully utilise all cores/threads.
Perhaps BM is not recognising all cores/threads (due to a bug or faulty CPU/etc)?
I would restart BM and ask him to post/give you this from Event manager, at least then we can see what BM is seeing in terms of CPU, etc:
30/06/2020 09:13:33 | | Windows processor group 0: 8 processors
30/06/2020 09:13:33 | | Host name: MYHOSTNAME
30/06/2020 09:13:33 | | Processor: 8 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz [Family 6 Model 60 Stepping 3]
30/06/2020 09:13:33 | | Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss htt tm pni ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 movebe popcnt aes f16c rdrandsyscall nx lm avx avx2 vmx smx tm2 pbe fsgsbase bmi1 smep bmi2
30/06/2020 09:13:33 | | OS: Microsoft Windows 10: Professional x64 Edition, (10.00.18363.00)
30/06/2020 09:13:33 | | Memory: 15.89 GB physical, 23.13 GB virtual