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Folding@Home Client's Performance Impact Measured
EconolineCrush writes "Trying to convince your boss to let you run Stanford's Folding@Home client on the machines at work? Here's an article that measures the performance impact of running the Folding@Home client that might help. The article examines the client's impact on the performance of business applications, games, workstation applications, and more. When set up correctly, the Folding@Home client can be run transparently in the background with only a negligible impact on system performance, which means your boss has one less reason to turn you down."
this article isn't going to convince him.
I can vouch that I see almost no slowdown for any apps. wheneer an app needs the power I can see folding at home letgo untill the CPU is free again.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
Of course the boss will listen when I direct him to a site that has lots of info for OMG M4D OvErClOkAz n GaMaZ! Once I get it set up, we'll have a lively benchmarking session and talk about heatsink compounds. Yes. This will happen.
You would be running the application on THIER machines, NOT yours. Ypu boss would have EVERY right to say NO.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
United Devices is another company that does grid computing for cancer research. Which leads me to ask the following question (this may be a stupid question, but I'm bio illiterate)..
Wouldn't protein folding have some sort of similarity in finding a cure for cancer?
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
...my completed results could be sent.
I ran their Linux client on a couple machines and it ran ok, didn't impact things too badly (remember "nice"?). But when it went to upload the finished results, it could never connect to the server that takes the finished data.
After two weeks of that, I pulled the client down. No one bothered to respond to my email, one person pointed to a discussion group for assistance, but since I'm already being overly generous with my time, it was more bother than it was worth.
Taco's Mom measured my impact, and let's just say: her measurement's of my immense impact unfolded were mighty impressive.
Whats that? Oh, no, it doesn't have anything to do with work.
Yes, it will have an adverse effect on the network performance but this web site I read claims it won't be all that bad.
Oh really? I should get the fuck back to work and quit fucking around with bullshit worthless personal stuff on company time or you'll fire the shit out of me?
Yes, thank you sir, back to work sir.
Cunning linguists
Don't get me wrong, I think distributed computing projects are great, especially those focused on legitimately useful research. However, running a distributed computing client on a machine at work will likely cause it to consume more electricity. A Pentium 4 has a maximum power consumption in the range of 65W, no? So every computer you install this on is like leaving a 60W lightbulb on 24-7, year-round. If you do this with many computers, I think that may add up to a nontrivial expense that you're essentially stealing from the company, no? Just playing devil's advocate...
With only 4 computers Folding@Home I try and use the other 2 machines at work for 40 hours each week. That is until the boss comes along and kills my clients.
>> this article isn't going to convince him.
probually not, but it might be able to confuse him enough so you can convince him of something else
I mean look at all those numbers and graphs!
No! .. slows down the pr0n downloads =)
/wave ;)
Its pretty common knowledge that running IDLE Tasks consume nearly no CPU time. Of course the overall performance will be SLIGHTLY lower because of context switching and the time it takes for the idle process to finish its time slice (no it wont preempt after 1 op or something - will do a few usecs of processing till the OS notices something else has to be done)...
The real question, which hasnt been answered on that article is how much network bandwith does it consume? I'm running folding@home on a few machines here but never really had the time to check how much of our network bandwith its taking away...
Hopefully not that much
ps.: awake for 32 hours, this posting might not make sense at all
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
at work and let me tell you, it eats up the processor like mad. It's supposed to wait until the cpu is idle before it goes to work but it consistently takes processor power away from other apps to do its work. *** DISCLAIMER *** this is not a slam at the folding at home client, more a slam at the distributed computing idea in general. It's a great idea when it works, it just doesn't seem like it works all that well all that often.
Folding@home is a good client to use, it is so versitle. You can run it on nearly every OS out there and like the article states it is pretty much transparent. Plus it is easy to hide on a PC as a service. It seems to run on nearly no resources. It would be the smart choice for anyone. 'Nuff said.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
I don't think that the reason your boss won't allow you to run Seti@Home isn't how it slows down companys computers. It's that those suckers take up more electricity when doing calculations. It's gonna cost your company a lot to calculate such things for fun.
...there's more than one reason it's called "Folding@HOME" and not "Folding@WORK". Hmm?
If you can't get permission the first time around, repeated pestering will not help your case.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
I doubt application performance is a issue unless you're running some horrible OS (Windows 9x) or have a slower cpu. What I'd like to see is how running these clients affect CPU life.
Obviously this is not a issue with corps that sell their hardware and buy new to get the new Microsoft OS Running, but with the speeds and the amount of heat the newer cpus are generating the IDLE calls that some OSes make probably have a impact on how long the CPU will actually live.
It's the increased power consumption I'd be worried about in his (the bosses) position.
... which SETI@home didn't bother to inform people that their data distribution method wasn't exactly working. (Everyone was checking over the same exact patch of sky 24/7 for weeks). That's what initially turned me off to SETI@home, and I haven't been back since.
... it applies to Folding@home as well. Thousands and thousands of CPUs, running floored will eat up a considerable amount of power. Is it wasted? No, I don't think so, as long as the distributed computing applications are worthwhile and advance our knowledge.
While 1 CPU running at full throttle 24/7 isn't going to make that big of a jump in the power bill. 500 CPUs... 1000, etc... will create a huge increase in power consumption over a long enough time frame.
I fully support distributed projects like Folding@home, SETI, etc... and run them on my machines, both at home and at work, but the power consumption is a legitimate concern.
I believe someone did a (unprofessional) investigation of the SETI@home debacle when it first came out, and came to the conclusion that something on the order of 100 or 1000 barrels of oil per day were wasted on checking over the same data repeatedly
Regardless
"Running the client as a service is a cleaner way to do things, because it will let you effectively hide the client from the hands of meddling users."
.exe in the startup?
If you're getting permission to run the client, why hide it??? And how does "stealth mode" make it any cleaner than not running it as a service, and (since the article is talking about running it in MS Windows 9x/NT/2k/Xp) just putting the
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Since most of these types of apps rely on "spare" CPU cycles, they basically keep the machine running at 100% cpu at all times. This causes the system to pull more power. Not only does this increase the electric bill, but it also keeps the temperature high all the time. This could have an impact on AC cooling costs as well, not to mention CPU life.
To me, that's the biggest deterrant from using it. I had been running the UnitedDevices client on my home computer. Since my computer ran all the time, I figured what the heck. But lately I've been trying to cut back on my power consumption. By leaving the UD client running 24/7, its like leaving an extra light bulb on, power wise.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
OK, so I don't really believe the last one because it seems that most buildings have such variation in number of computers and people moving through etc. But that doesn't stop the other two for being equally accurate.
Quit goofing off on Slashdot. Get back to your project. You are already a week behind. All unauthorized downloads, installations, and data transfers violate company IT security protocols. Workstations are company assests and will be used accordingly.
Sound familiar?
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
They have a message board (phpbb!) and not only is there a knowledgable community, but the admins usually comment.
http://forum.folding-community.org/
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
My company is moderately sized (~140 employees) and uses a large amount of bandwidth on a near constant basis. While our data does not need to flow in real time, any disruption in our network can cause quite an uproar directed at the IT department, of which I am a member.
While the data transfers involved with projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home are small in comparison to our normal traffic, my superiors were concerned that if many connections were made to the central server simultaneously, there would be a noticable drop in performance.
I think this bandwidth issue, and not client performance, stands as the major roadblock to more corporate participantion.
-Shadow
...but it might help you get to the truth about why you're not being allowed to do it.
We all know that the vast majority of CPU cycles are wasted. If your boss is telling you that you can't do it because of the impact on the workstation, they're most likely lying to you. Most bosses either
Of course, addressing these issues with your boss is far from easy, but if proving to them that workstation performance is not the issue forces them to raise the real issue then at least you have a chance.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
i work for a canadian federal government department, and the main reason software like this is a huge no-no is mainly because it could have adverse effects on other in-house developed applications that are mission-critical to our clients needs. extensive testing is done only with "standard" applications that every user has.
we learned this the hard way when we thought installing w2k service pack 2 was a good idea when sp1 was the department standard. one of our in-house apps was crashing at random times and the suits upstairs were starting to ask questions. luckily this didnt come down on us as another problem was the cause of the crash's, and saved us a world of grief
Does anyone really think that the reason these things are being rejected by management is because of performance???
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Just go back to secretly installing the d.net client on everything you can find, maybe you'll find that $5000 and be able to tell the boss off!
The same happens with mine on NT. I wasn't sure if it was something to do with the google client.
Going off of the point that actually running these distributed programs are not free. I think these programs should allow companies to be given some sort of tax credit or break.
This would definitely speed up development, and provide an incentive to the companies with massive amounts of unused computers usually left on anyways during the evenings. At least at my work place this is the case.
It would be a more effective tool if the user had a choice of when to run at a higher priority by using a sheduling program or cron. If everyone set the priority to high when they were not using their computers we could help eradicate these dreadful diseases.
Now I am sure that it would affect winmx and other filesharing P2P networks but at least give the user a choice. Perhaps corporations could get a tax break for contributing resources to these projects?
My 2cents anyway.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Every additional processor cycle consumes a lot of power. When we have sales representatives using database clients and email on their Windows workstations, they are actually using very little of their machine's computing capacity. This allows us to save money on power bills when the excess cycles go unused.
However, if you're some rogue employee who has decided to boost his stats through installing unapproved software on company machines, you're costing the company a fortune in power bills. Sure, it doesn't seem like it would be much with one machine. But after a while, economies of scale kick in and you start to see huge losses in increased power usage through the increased workload on the processors and the associated costs, such as computer power consumption, air conditioning costs and medical insurance.
That, and these clients are proprietary, so we cannot review them for possible security risks. It's an incident waiting to happen.
--sdem
Hey I am right there with you. I run a 1 GHz and a 550 MHz daily.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
I refuse to participate in a project that puts USofA in the center of the world map. Obviously, these are meant to degrade us who live outside this country.
Bring me back the good old Alaska-to-Siberia map.
You get 1gig worth of Data from EasyNews for every 15 CPU Days! :)
But are those 1 GB data credits worth a discount off EasyNews's basic monthly subscription rate? Or are those credits useful only for heavy downloaders who exceed 6 GB of downloads in a month? I'm on Verizon dial-up, and I'm still looking for a reason to switch from my ISP's news server.
And are CPU days from my 866 MHz PIII desktop computer worth more than CPU days from my 333 MHz PII laptop?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't know if this is widely known yet but at work we have the google toolbar installed on our windows 2k workstations.
:-) There is also mention of being able to participate in other such distributed computing projects in the future.
The MIS guy at least approved their use.
Last week, I saw that the Google Toolbar had self updated, and one of the new features was the ability to opt in for participation in the Folding@Home project through the use of the Google Toolbar.
It appears that at the time this feature is limited to only a select clients. Nevertheless I sent a request to the MIS guy about it, and if I could enable it. He had no issues with it. (Aka run it if you want)
Perhaps if the MIS/IT person already lets you use the Google Toolbar on the Windows machine, then they would probably be more trusting of running Folding@Home through the Google Toolbar.
I haven't noticed any significant slow downs using regular mode, and in any case you can switch between regular and conservative modes. Conservative mode running when you're not using the computer.
Also although I dont have the link at the moment handy (at home on my Mac
.... ... }
int main (void) {
The report covers Windows, but I want to know about the effect on Linux. A couple of years ago I ran Seti@home on some of the Solaris boxes where I worked. Even though it was nice -19, it had a very noticable impact on system performance. My solution was a script that monitored the system load and killed the client whenever the server was busy doing real work.
In Windows, I think there are scheduling classes such that a low priority idle task will not receive any cycles if a normal priority task needs to run.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
It would be cool if there could be some sort of tax credit or break of some kind given for using spare CPU cycles for a good/government-research related cause....Just a thought.
Personally if you are really interested in helping that research along, rather than risk the ire of your management, you should be using your computer @home. Supposedly it's doing nothing while you are at work supposedly doing useful stuff.
This sort of research is useful, unlike the SETI@home stuff which is purporting to find intelligent life in the universe. I can tell you right now, they won't find it. That's because they are looking for evidence of human-like `civilization' and not intelligent life.
A Duron 1.2GHz with 256 MB of RAM is a low end system? That's a pretty decent low-end system of *now*, but what about using a machine that's 2 years old or more? You know, those sub 1-GHz machines and 128MB of RAM (if you're lucky)? Man, that low-end system is far faster than what I use at work (and what most people use).
What about memory consumption? Having to hit the swapfile more often because its running would slow down a compile job, or heck, just the apparent responsiveness of the system. If opening a document takes 10 seconds longer because the system has to swap, I'd say that has a far more annoying impact than the miniscule extra CPU resources...
Exactly, even if the article is technically sound, factual, and clear. Management doesn't work on these principles. :-)
Seriously though, I cannot even run Linux on my desktop, because it is not "company approved software". I work for a big company, can you tell? When I even hint at anything Linux or Open Source, I get an immediate brick wall. No matter how logical or technically fantastic a solution, if it ain't "company approved", it ain't happening.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
running a distributed computing client on a machine at work will likely cause it to consume more electricity. A Pentium 4 has a maximum power consumption in the range of 65W, no?
How much electricity does it use running the screen saver? Even if you have your OS set to underclock the CPU at idle time and put the display on standby instead of displaying a screen saver, the CPU isn't the only power-draining component in your box; there's a chipset, a video card, a hard drive, a sound card, and a network card. The only way that running a background number-crunching app would eat a large amount of electric power is if you would otherwise turn your computer off.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if it was possible to use the extra-cost to energy as a tax write-off as a charitable donation?
Well, OK, given how everyone is now very suspicious of corp financials, at the very least you could use the work for PR. e.g. Company A uses spare computer resources to help fight cancer, etc etc.
If I had a micromanaging PHB that came over and said...
"Excuse me dman123, but you seem to be running MS Word and MS Excel at the same time. I am sure there is a performance degradation hit there somewhere when you try to open or save a doc. Please see Jan in Payroll about the immediate reduction in salary."
...I'd prolly get fired over what I would do to him just after that.
If performance really did take a hit, I would hope that the user would notice and do something about it.
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
(2) p2 450 256Mb here...running win2k. at least its taught me to be a resource freak.
The problem with this is, there is no way that the wear on the machines is also "negligible." An average business workstation probably has something like 1% CPU usage average each day. When you bump that up to 100% (and drive and memory a related amount), it will shorten the computer's life.
This is why volunteer distributed computation has been primarily popular among academics, students, and low-wage tech workers; people who aren't financially responsible for the computers to which they have access.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
True story, with details ignored / changed to protect the guilty:
A production system handling multi-million dollar transactions began to slow and crash for absolutely no reason we could fathom. As each degradation of the system was costing the company involved tens of thousands of dollars at a shot, the president and other higher-ups were growing quite irate about the difficulty and wanted it fixed NOW.
A few days of frustrating troubleshooting by a team of techs discovered the problem: Someone had installed SETI@Home on the production system and it was interfering with other operations. Having incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars of opportunity-cost losses in those few days, the 'professional' responsible for that stupidity was thrown out on their ass the instant they were identified as the culprit.
The moral of the story: If you're paid to be a professional, be one. Use business systems for _business_ and if you want to run fun stuff, do it on your own time and on your own dime.
I thought @home already folded!
You're using her as bait, Master!
We've had this problem with the GUI coders (VB and .NET monkeys) at our place. The stuff they produce will crash at the slightest provocation (such as being installed on the 'wrong' partition!). They then try to push the blame on to users for having 'non-standard' configurations (like more than one hard-drive). If someone can't write portable, maintainable, reliable, efficent code they should find a job that demands less technical skill - like flipping burgers.
By comparison the seti/folding@home clients are written to be portable (especially folding@home) and have been tested on many thousands of different computers, reliablity at the users end is more indicative of in-house issues.
It's a security risk, plain and simple. Running this on any company machine containing files that we care about, or that is behind the firewall, is too much of a risk to even consider.
Overly anal? No. All it takes is for someone to discover a buffer overrun in the application, create an exploit, and poison our DNS to get data from their site instead of folding@home's site. This is perfectly possible, and should it happen, could be devastating.
I don't care enough about folding@home to risk company security. The CPU cycles we would have spent crunching data for them are not an issue, especially if the cycles would have been wasted anyway. I would gladly spend those if there were no risk.
nobody cares about your company. think about it. its important to you, but it makes a grain of salt of difference to anyone else.
Except every script kiddie out there who has a different, specific target in mind for a DoS attack. Most people hit by viruses and worms weren't even known to the attacker, let alone the intended target. If all the @home distributed computing projects are important enough to you, fine. If your security is more important, you'd be stupid to run the risk.
I won't run it until they get something similiar to the old distributed.net personal proxy. ONE machine connecting to a server to load up on work units and all the other machines directed to it is cool. Having every machine Folding@home runs on connecting to the net all hours of the day and night is not.
Extra heat from the CPU can add an extra ~5% to the cost of electricity required to run an air conditioner.
[I'm a mechanical engineer and have done some airconditioning design work]
Actually, computers can have a significant effect on air-conditioning services of buildings, particularly large computer labs which are in constant use (ie. computers are pumping out heat continually). I would not be at all surprised to find out that the running cost of airconditioning for a building would increase as a result of significantly more computers (or, as in this case, the computers pumping out significantly more heat).
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
In today's dismal health arena, I wonder what the patent rights are on the results of such computing. They are using our CPU resources to find an answer and, even though the results might be published academically, some pharm company is going to take them and make a few over-priced drugs.
Perhaps someday I won't even be able to afford the drugs that are a result of my CPU cycles. That's not to discourage donating cycles, but it is something to think about.
Your boss doesn't know that it poses no risk to his property, and he is not obligated to listen to arguments to that effect. To him, taking the risk offers no return, so it makes no sense.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Yes, you're running Debian. To resolve this issue please refrain from using Debian and restore your computer to its intended factory settings in which you bought it.
According to SETI@home this doesn't create any addtional strain on the CPU.
"Will running SETI@home overload or burn out my CPU?
No. The CPU on most computers is always executing instructions (often the operating system's "idle loop") whenever the computer is turned on. It's no additional strain to execute SETI@home."
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/faq.html#q37
So who is right?
Can anyone prove to me in an argument how more electricity is used when a CPU processes more data as opposed to being idle? Before I incorportate that little "fact" into my common sense, I want to know I'm not hearing the latest urban legend.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
i agree, the coding should be of higher quality that such problems dont crop up. im on the desktop/client support side rather then the developing so ive seen similar problems happen because applications like webshots (wallpaper software), gator and other p2p clients/messengers have been installed.
on our side its always a risk to give a user non-standard software. were still running w2k sp1 and office xp sp1, because the massive amounts of testing needed to make sure the newest service pack dosent mess up any of our in-house (or externally developed) software hasent been done or completed yet.
it took our department almost 2 years of testing w2k to finally upgrade from windows 95/office 97
Is the donation of time / resources to this considered tax deductable? That might sway a few PHBs.
A bit of a stupid question I guess, but does anyone know what the IP ramifications of this project are? I don't really want the spare cycles of my machine to help someone get a patent to lock the general public out of benefitting from this biz. I checked the page but I find no mention of IP, which hopefully means it's public material, but I'm not sure.
Point two is ridiculous considering how long the lifespan of cpu's are, and even more so if you take into account the fraction of that lifespan that they are actually in use, on average.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I can agree with number 3... Running my athlon XP 1900+ mad overclocked, and leaving a dist. computing prog running can sure heat up the room!
--JonnyBlog
Sounds like the results of porn to me.
He's the biggest porn viewer of them all.
"similarity" in finding a cure for cancer. post a reply or email me to clarify, b/c I think I can answer your question.
a quick bio summary:
There are about 35,000 genes in the human genome, which means there are >35,000 different kinds of proteins in our bodies over our lifetime. Each of these proteins has a 3-dimensional structure that is nearly impossible to predict from genetic information alone. The 3-dimensional structure of a protein, along with its composition, determines the functionality of the protein. Determining the 3D structure of a protein and discovering the steps necessary for a peptide chain to wriggle up into a mature protein is called the "Protein Folding Problem"
In many kinds of Cancer, genetic mutations have occurred that cause either a problem with the way a protein folds up and thus changed its functionality; or a mutation has occurred such that the genetic instructions have changed, causing some proteins to be made more or less often than usual. Usually what happens is a whole lot of things get changed before cancer is diagnosed.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
if you propose running this client, your boss will think you're an a$$hole and should be kept away from normal people.
im helping to keep heating costs down by running folding at home during the autumn, winter and spring months. AC runs here like one or two months a year :p
________________________________________________
usually when idle, operating systems tell the cpu to sleep. in x86, this is called HLT. when it sleeps, it uses less electricity, it heats up less, etc...
(does not apply to windows 95/98, they dont HLT at idle. if you're using either of those systems, there are third party programs to HLT at idle time, though, to cool down the cpu.)
-- Matti Nikki
maybe the extra power usage in winter would be good for lowering the heating bills?
Has there been any studies done on this?
Obviously during the summer, extra power usage always bad (higher rates and more air conditioning) however, I am pretty sure these huge 19" CRT monitors that my company has do more damage to the electricity bill than the CPU)
I'll have to check it out I guess because I could never get the damn thing to work for me. I'm using Windows XP Pro. Folding crashed a lot...well, in between the usual crashes :P
I'd like to get it working since it's far more useful than SETI.
You're joking, right? You're comparing an OS upgrade like SP2 to running another application on your PC? Microsoft's half-assed "service-packs" aren't just software programs, and they do tend to fuck everything in the OS. Running other apps concurrently with whatever you have developed is a completely different scenario.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
What about the graphical version?
I prefer it over the text version. Its nice to look at and goes in my taskbar, but sometimes it will prevent 3d apps (games) from runing on my box. It seems to steal the focus from the games.
GF3 on dual p3 900's win2ksp3
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
Every dollar lost because of a corporate tax break either:
1. Gets taken away from government programs.
2. Gets added to the tax burdon placed on the populace.
So, if you're really for this, start offering to send YOUR money to coorporations if they're willing to run these distributed computing clients. Personally, I'd like to keep my money...
Dupe posts are
and it causes global warming!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I'm saying that they are trying to cover a "broad range of systems" and that by basing their "low-end" on a 1.2 which isn't the norm (definitely not in a buisness I've worked with anyways).
Folding@Home won't run on any of my Debian Unstable machines. It segfaults shortly after execution. Haven't had the time to track it down yet. Right now I am only running Folding on Debian Testing.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
I stopped using seti@home the day I put a UPS on my servers. With my Linux box, I'm sure the @home process uses more power than the idle task; I'm not sure about my XP box though. I suppose one option would be to have the UPS daemon disable the @home processes when power goes out.
Your monitor is staring at you.
Sorry for this being so trollish, but I am sick of the misunderstanding in PC energy use that runs rampant on Slashdot.
I work for an energy consulting firm, and one of the many tools we have around the office is something called a "plug logger". You plug it into the wall and then a device into the logger and it will tell you the power of the device (in WATTS) and will accumulate energy (in kWh). Check out www.pacscitech.com/newdocs/detailsPlugLogger.html for more info.
I have a PII/400 workstation, w/ 2 CD drives, 2 HDs, 19" Monitor, speakers and subwoofer. The logger was installed and connected to the PC 450 days ago. The monitor is turned off when we aren't in the office (12 hours/day plus weekends). The PC is left on continuously. So far it has consumed 1096 kWh. That's about 2.5 kWh/day and in New York state, that equals $0.34/day. When the monitor is on, the whole system consumes 165 watts. Without the monitor it's 65 watts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you are concerned about electricity, get a TFT instead of a CRT. And turn the damn screen off when you leave!
As for the other arguments, logic switches wearing out should not be a problem for today's equipment with its 3-year lifespan, and the extra heat helps cut down on heating costs in the right climates...
don't want to consume these fucked up articles with those annoying "split apart to make me view shitloads of ads" feature.
stop it. don't link that crap.
I just booted it up, along with process viewer to see what kind of hit I actually take. On my iBook 600mhz, 256mb RAM, OS X.2.1 Folding@Home uses 10-30% of my CPU's resources.
This is when I'm running Chimera, Terminal, Brickhouse, iChat, Console, iTunes and Process viewer.
When I kill everything but Process Viewer and Chimera, the little parasite snags 30-50% CPU time.
Low priority...right. Maybe it's low priority on PCs, but here in Mac land the thing is a CPU vampire.
Regarding extra heat....
If you have a slow CPU you don't have to worry. Being an experimentalist by training, I just tested it out on a 350 MHz Pentium II. I ran the CPU for an hour under two conditions: 100% usage with F@H, and at 5% usage. There was absolutely no difference to the CPU temperature (39 C) over that time. YMMV.
What about network resources? Lately our IS guys have been cracking down on bandwith hogs, such as Internet radio, Kazaa, etc., because our networks were getting overloaded. Has anyone measured the network usage of these programs and whether a default install (most people don't know how to tweak) would cause significant network strain?
They certainly aren't. The system's "idle loop" these days often involves use of the HLT instruction, which powers down most of the CPU until it recieves an interrupt.
Making a fuss and planting trees on the weekend is great, you should also carry that presence of mind into your everyday actions.
Turn off your monitor when you leave for the day.
Don't not running hot water if you're not using it.
Thinking twice about having ten old computers on 24x7 in your house. It might be cool, but maybe DNS doesn't need it's own server (whoa, really?). Two one 24x7 is probably more than enough, unless you have some special need.
Sure there may be exceptions to these things -- that's fine. Just be conscious of your actions. Decide to leave the monitor on, don't just be lazy about it. (same thing goes for speeding, yelling at people, getting drunk, etc. They may or may not be bad, but decide to do them -- don't just fall into it.)
Maybe I'm some Berkeley nut-case, but usually when I leave work at night, I go by and turn off all of the monitors on my way out. People sometimes talk to me about it and I give them my shpeel, but when they leave the next day, it's more of the same. Is it too much for people to think about these things?
there is no thing
what else could you want?
I used to leave my computer on 24/7 before I bought a hardware gateway for my roommates to share net access. If I left my bedroom door open at night, it was fine, but if I had closed it, I'd wake up and notice my room is abnormally warm.
Since I've been leaving the computer off lately (using the nifty Hibernate feature), my room stays about the same temperature whether the door is open or closed..
And that's just one PC. I recently purchased a kill-a-watt device. I think I will give it a run and see the power consumption difference when I'm running a number-crunching background program vs a regular idle... I'll post results if I remember (feel free to nag me if I don't) =)
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
The website listed doesn't mention who is benefitting from all this research and computing power.
Of course, the ultimate benefit will be society when someone comes up with some useful counter to the diseases caused by mis-folded proteins.
I'm more concerned with whether someone out there is going to patent the technology after using all of the research we helped them gather then setup some kind of new bio-tech company and make millions.
I'm not about to help people who are just going to own information that are planning to make millions and all because I let them use MY computing resources.
I'm sick of these groups of people who push these distributed computing projects off like they don't cost the users anything. It's kind of like the concept of spare change. Just because I have some doesn't mean you can have it and it doesn't mean it doesn't cost me anything.
I had a P4 machine that would slow down while doing number crunching. Turned out it was over heating when diddling numbers. The P4 chippy would slow itself down when it got hot. The solution was a bigger heatsink on the P4 and an extra case fan sucking the air out of the case, blowing it out the back. CPU temp dropped from 60C to 30C when running this app.
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion there. What you've described only proves that your processor cooling method was capable of maintaining a stable temperature irrespective of load. Try repeating your test with the heatsink disconnected, and post the results if your PC is still working afterwards :-)
Andrew
# Extra heat from the CPU can add an extra ~5% to the cost of electricity required to run an air conditioner.
How about the cost of processors dying because modern CPUs/cooling systems are not designed to run under full load full-time. We've had nasty problems with Athlons running these kinds of apps.
The #1 reason your boss, or your IT dept, has for turning you down has nothing to do with performance, and everything to do with stability (Talking about Windows here)
Simply, us IT folk generally don't want anyone running anything they don't NEED to run on a daily basis on their computer, period, because every additional thing adds complexity.
It's a stability and a security risk.
What's the best way to manage 100 windows 2000 workstations centrally.. if I want to do something like install folding@home on all of them at once.
What operating system did you use? DOS and Win9x don't execute the HLT instruction when idle, so the processor is always at 100% usage (you can download third-party software to cool the CPU). Linux and WinNT use the HLT instruction to cool the CPU while idle, so you should see some difference in the CPU temperature (I don't know if it's enough to affect the room temperature). IIRC, the HLT instruction has been available since the Pentium-MMX chips, so your system should support it.
This article has to have used the lamest testing procedure anyone could have come up with.
Not only does it not address the issues such as increased temperature, increased power consumption, but every single test they performed was a high priority number cruncher.
You can, and will, see performance degredation in various aspects of your usage.
Did the author forget that other processes may be running at low priority as well and will be starved of cpu time? One that comes to mind and has been used as an example in the past is garbage collection in Java applications. The garbage collection process runs at low priority and simply won't happen.
Another issue is that it takes time to switch between tasks, the OS schedule has much more to deal with when running distributed computing processes. Not to mention the many megabytes of memory consumed by Folding@home.
While I support distributed computing applications I also think these tests are a poor picture of what really happens. Several others have already discussed the security concerns, so I won't even bother with that.
scott
If you can't already explain process priority to your boss, you're fired.
At first, I thought this article was about the ISP @home folding (ie - going out of business). I thought to myself "didn't that happen already? What a redundant story this is" lol.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
However, if your computer is a laptop that you run on batteries for a significant fraction of the time, be careful - NiMH batteries really don't like to power CPU-burners, and as they age, they tend to fail in ugly ways. I used to have a one-hour train commute, and my laptop simply did *not* like running GIMPS. Also, even if I turned it off when I was running on batteries, it slowed down the recharge process significantly when I plugged back in again, and I don't think it liked that either.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I disconnected the cooling system on my computer as you suggested. Now my PC isn't working!! I'm not sure that I ever did get all the wires stuffed back in right. It was my dad's PC, and will he ever be p****d. Could you look at the photos of what we did and make a suggestion?http://www.physics.auburn.edu/~plasma/f usion/fusion_lab/cth/updates/dismantling_cat.htm
65W * 12 extra hrs per day * 365.25 day per year * 1/1000 KWH / WH * $0.09/KWH = $25.64 / year
Assuming a $50K/yr salary (and not counting other employee costs), even adding in the same amount of money in increased air conditioning, this is only equivalent to a tenth of a percent increase per employee. Maybe when you're in your apartment you notice the extra electricity cost, but a corporation with lots of employees will not.
And what of the energy savings if the cpu's extra heat production helps heat the building in an area where it is cold? :)
I used folding@home for a while. I saw very little system performance impact, until I played Warcraft III. The menu system and the pointer were seriously lagged when I played a campaign with the folding client running in the background.
WURD!!
How much, those useless stupid screensavers, which are generally badly coded waste the "precious" idle time needed for CPU?
You are all techies, next time walk around in a corparate environment and check if any machine sits idle. No.. They generally love that outdated MS scroll screensaver etc.
Why not use United Devices cancer thing or protein folding instead of that crap screen saver? It _does_ something indeed.
An observation that I've made on my lower-than-low AMD900 system, is that F@Home definately effects the PC's performance. I can visually see windows & menus being drawn distinctly slower than normal. Quitting out of F@Home fixes the problem.
I was wondering if anyone else out there with a similar low-end PC can verify this on their PC - an easy, obvious method to demonstrate this is to have some nice long bookmark menus in Mozilla, they are repainted visually slower than when I don't run F@Home.
PS. I'm not mad, it actually does happen. RC5 & Seti don't have the same side-effect at all on my system.
I've been running it and they're right, it doesn't effect performance. But I'm still concerned about acutally bandwidth use (i.e. how many kilobytes a second on average are we talking about). I can't imagine it's too much, but I don't think my isp would like say, a 100k/s worth of bandwidth running on my machine at all times. Thought I'd ask just in case.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In fact, S. M. Simpson, eventually devised an efficient 24-point Fourier
transform, which was a precursor to the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform
in 1965. The FFT made all of Simpson's efficient autocorrelation and
spectrum programs instantly obsolete, on which he had worked half a lifetime.
-- Proc. IEEE, Sept. 1982, p.900
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