I want to run a distributed computing grid client on a box, but it takes all the CPU it can get and there is no throttle option for the Linux client yet. It's not having scheduling issues, and it gracefully lets other needy processes take over, but after that it eats all the CPU. I wouldn't have a problem with this if the box in question had more than basic cooling (and additional cooling isn't an option). Running the CPU at 100% all the time would quickly overheat things. I'm looking for a way to throttle the CPU usage of just that particular process, without impacting the performance of the rest of the machine.

Thanks in advance

Do you have access to the source code for the client?

If so, you can use the select() function call to wait for things to happen, rather than spinning while repeatedly checking.

Hope this helps.

It's meant to eat CPU, actually, it's not an optimization problem -- the box does very little and I figure it would be great to let it crunch data for World Community Grid.

I have just started testing some code that went up on lkml in the last couple of weeks.
Given that a couple of patch sets regress each other I don't think you'll want to try it just yet ...
However, it is in the forseeable future.

This is the result of several projects (slowly) coming together, and this time looks pretty hopeful.