Workunits

A workunit describes a computation to be performed. Workunits are maintained in the workunit table in the BOINC DB. The attributes of a workunit include:

The inputs to a workunit are described by an XML document of the form

[ <file_info>...</file_info> ]
[ ... ]
<workunit>
    <name>foobar</name>
    <app_name>blah</app_name>
    [ <version_num>1</version_num> ]
    [ <command_line>-flags xyz</command_line> ]
    [ <env_vars>name=val&name=val</env_vars> ]
    [ <file_ref>...</file_ref> ]
    [ ... ]
<workunit>
The components are:

A workunit is associated with an application, not with a particular version or set of versions???. If the format of your input data changes in a way that is incompatible with older versions, you must create a new application. This can often be avoided by using XML data format.

The create_work utility program provides a simplified interface for creating workunits.