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."

Comments

And if your boss wouldn't let you do it before...

[aslagle]

this article isn't going to convince him.

Your boss has EVERY reason to turn you down

[DraKKon]

You would be running the application on THIER machines, NOT yours. Ypu boss would have EVERY right to say NO.

Still not a guilt-free process...

[PseudoThink]

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...

Re:Still not a guilt-free process...

[kennylives]

No. The electricity used is not the issue within a company. The machines are on 24x7 anyway; the business has alreay accepted that cost of doing business.

What many businesses do not accept is the security and liability implications of running outside, unapproved code on their machines, expecially production boxen. "Who supports it when it crashes?", "What assurance do we have that it's not a trojan, gathering data?", "Why should we pay for their IT needs?" - these are just a few of the questions that a reasonably intellegent IT manager should/would be asking.

Of course, after all that, there's still the argument that "They're our machines, not yours. That's why." There's no easy way to answer that one and win.

Re:Still not a guilt-free process...

[Anonymous Coward]

"They're our machines, not yours. That's why." There's no easy way to answer that one and win.

Folding@Home can be used for advertisement purposes. Start a team for your company, including a link to your webpage. Just something that'll help a company get noticed. I've checked out links for random teams myself.

Having said that, I used to run F@H on my boxes at home, and one of my processors eventually failed, so I don't run it anymore, especially not at work.

Re:Still not a guilt-free process...

[Waffle Iron]

The machines are on 24x7 anyway; the business has alreay accepted that cost of doing business.

I've hooked an ammeter to the AC power cord on my Athlon system. It sucks down about 20 more watts when the CPU is under load than when it is idle. It makes sense that you would use more power when the logic units, memory cells and bus signals are doing more work.

OTOH, nobody ever seems to care when most of the employees leave their big hot CRTs turned 24x7. Each of these is wasting 50 to 100W of power. Look at most any office building at night; you can see all of the monitors that people are too lazy to flip off.

Just maybe..

[JPelorat]

...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.

Re:And if your boss wouldn't let you do it before.

[gazbo]

But what about electricity usage? The recent case of the sysadmin who was fined a huge amount by the university for running a distributed client gave some figures:

• Electricity usage increases by ~60% when spare cycles are used.
  
• Logic switches in CPUs wear out up to ~15% sooner than if the idle cycles were left unused giving them time to cool down - we all know what a problem heat can be.
  
• Extra heat from the CPU can add an extra ~5% to the cost of electricity required to run an air conditioner.

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.

Exactly...

[theduck]

...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

• don't understand the impact
• don't trust you to be keeping the best interests of the business in mind when you load stuff like this onto company workstations
• are afraid they'll get reamed if this stuff causes, or is blamed for causing, any problem with company IS resources

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.

Re:Exactly...

[tmark]

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.

Why should bosses have to justify declining a request like this to employees ? Considering that:

1. there IS a performance hit, that might just be smaller than previously thought,
   
2. distributed clients WILL result in more energy usage, heat generation, and reduced component life,
   
3. employees WILL use some of their paid-for time installing the client, and
   
4. the company may suffer losses if a program crashes, perhaps compromising the integrity of data on the computer
   
5. the company will NOT receive any direct benefit
   

Aren't the above reasons good enough reasons why employees shouldn't be feeding their hobby and pet interests while being paid ? Even if all the above except 5) were wrong, isn't 5) enough that bosses shouldn't have to worry about justifying their decisions to people who are being paid to work on other projects ?

Performance impact is the least of your worries

[Kombat]

Managers and IT admins don't decline this sort of thing over something as pedantic as performance degradation - they decline it over much bigger issues, including but not limited to

• Risk of virus/worm infection
  
• Risk of inadvertently exposing a security hole
  
• Risk of compromising proprietary information
  
• Decreased employee productivity over installing/watching the client
  
• Lost time/money if this thing crashes an employee's machine, just as they were putting the finishing touches on the customer presentation due in 20 minutes
  

Does anyone really think that the reason these things are being rejected by management is because of performance???

Whoa. If only I was so lucky...

[tlhIngan]

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...

what about wear and tear?

[tps12]

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.

Re:software/application compatibility is the reaso

[vrai]

Without wishing to sound rude you could attempt to write applications that don't fall over at the slightest push. If your in-house apps can't co-exist with low impact software like seti/folding@home then the problem lies with your coders, not the distributed processing applications.

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.

Re:Usefull?

[Ashran]

> If you're not using your computers, it doesn't matter, now, does it?
Yes! Some pay per bandwith used, and even if its flat, 100 PC's on a corporate network could generate some neat network traffic too.
I think my UD client downloads ~600k for each Work Unit ..
Thats not much, but adds up ..

Patent rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Patent rights?

[thrillseeker]

The sooner these drugs are discovered then the cheaper they will be when you need them.

Tax deductable

[kangolo]

Is the donation of time / resources to this considered tax deductable? That might sway a few PHBs.

IP issues?

[DraconicFae]

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.

Re:What's with the politically incorrect map?

[frankie]

Yow, thanks for pointing that out. I categorically oppose usage of Mercator maps for any purpose other than nautical navigation.

Sheesh, especially for displaying geographic data about the folding clients, Equirectangular would be a much better choice, since the calculation for point placement is perfectly linear.