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

I am the boss

[Real World Stuff]

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?

Re:Your boss has EVERY reason to turn you down

[I_redwolf]

and what your boss doesn't know doesn't hurt him/her especially if it doesn't affect bottom line any and it's for a good cause. System critical stuff not recommended. Secretaries desktop, she's/he's probably using more cycle to play solitaire or chat or whatever it is they do when they aren't working.

It's still stealing

[I Am The Owl]

While it may seem innocent enough, it is immoral and probably illegal to run these things at work. As an IT manager for a large department, I certainly wouldn't let anything of the sort happen. Why?

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.