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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.
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.
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...
...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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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...
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.
In any modern operating system, a "low priority" thread will happily take 100% of the CPU if nothing else is running. Low priority doesn't mean it hangs on 10% just in case something wants the CPU -- it means that if a high priority and a low priority process both want the CPU, the high priority process is going to get a larger slice.
"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.