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Folding@Home Client's Performance Impact Measured

Posted by timothy on from the drops-in-the-protein-bucket dept.

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."

2 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. It Would Be Nice If... by zentec · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.

  2. Folding@Home with Google Toolbar by codeonezero · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't know if this is widely known yet but at work we have the google toolbar installed on our windows 2k workstations.

    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 :-) There is also mention of being able to participate in other such distributed computing projects in the future.

    --

    ....
    int main (void) { ... }