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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."
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
boring, of course he has the right to. does that mean you cant attempt to convince otherwise (and in this case a joke about doing so). if you think so, you are an impediment to change.
"why find a better route to india, this one works fine"
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/
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
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
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
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
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.
This is actually the reason I stopped doing distributed.net. Not only the power consumption of the Athlons never being idles, but in my computer room it is hard enough to control the heat and A/C costs a lot.
Seeing your Athlons near operating maximums all the time has got to wear on the equipment. I started seeing instabilities with RAM (which I had to replace at a cost of a few hundred dollars).
When the Processor is idle most of the time the system runs significantly cooler.
Brian Macy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously, you've never been a boss. Why expose yourself to security, legal, or financial risks with no potential gain? YOUR boss could be fired or sanctioned for authorizing software. Those are exactly the thoughts running through your bosses head. It may be short sighted, but that's business.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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
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.
Your boss has EVERY *right* to turn you down. He has NO *reason*.
Oh, he has many reasons. While I like the idea, if it were up to me, they would not run at my company. Why? Well, you see you maintain a standard infrastructure, right down to the desktop. With 20,000 desktops that is quite a bit of work! To minimize the costs and lower the TCO we package applications and deploy them to the workstation. And since we have government regulations we have to meet, we test applications against each other. Small applications may not seem like much, but the unknown factor of such applications, in some environments, can cause conflicts that were not detected before, and worse, it could lead to data corruption. Even the possibility of corrupted data can cost our company billions of dollars. Sometimes you just need to know the difference between work and home and leave it at that. Will I run it at home? I don't know. I'll see how it runs with Seti@home