FAH in the workplace

[Berend]

Suppose I worked at a multinational corporation in an industry that is very engineering and computation intensive, but also very concerned with IT security. Suppose further that I wanted to propose to my employer that we as a company begin running folding@home. How would I best proceed? What tools and information could you give me to help me make my case?

[NookieBandit]

While it's a laudable goal to get a large multinational engaged in FAH, the challenges you'll likely face are not trivial. In fact, security might be the least of your worries. Put yourself in your manager's shoes and consider:

* The capital tied up in computing systems where the company's primary work product is engineering and computationally intensive raises questions of efficient capital utilization. In other words, if there is significant underutilized computing capability, the first question will be, "why" and the second question will be, "how do we get rid of it". By proving that your multinational company can be a meaningful contributor to FAH, you could also be identifying mis-allocated capital invested in computing systems, which apparently is the lifeblood of your company. Once you're down that path, all the previous purchase decisions will start to be questioned, and invariably someone in the management chain between you and the CEO will ultimately be fingered as the one who pulled the trigger on acquiring all those underutilized computing platforms laying around your data centers. So, what starts out as a way to show a nicely innovative corporate responsibility action ends up being a CLM (career limiting move) by shining a light in an area where some executive will not think too kindly of your efforts to point out all the "availability" of computing horsepower the company has.

* Even if you get past the first issue, the next will likely be the power cost to run high performance systems on a continuous basis, the possible decrease in component life, additional maintenance costs and any impact to productivity FAH may have on the daily tasks your company carries out. Indeed, the CPU part of FAH gets out-of-the-way very nicely when running applications with higher priority, but the GPU part of FAH doesn't. If your company runs computationally intensive tasks involving any GPU resources, that will end up being a really big deal if your engineering team starts complaining. You could, perhaps, argue that the additional hard costs of power and maintenance could be tax deductible, but until Stanford/PG provides an annual accounting of work units processed per username and passkey and you can tie them to the specific systems used to process them and the power used in doing so, you don't have the basis for claiming the deduction, and even if it did the accounting overhead expense wouldn't justify the tax deduction for a large multinational.

I certainly don't want to discourage you, but having been an executive in large tech companies, I'm trying to give you the shorthand version so that you don't get involved with something that doesn't turn out like you planned. A better alternative might be something like this:

* It's likely the case your company regularly upgrades/updates it's computing platforms every 2 to 3 years. You might consider approaching someone in your company heading up public relations/marketing communications at the corporate level where they typically manage corporate donations. Rather than trading those older systems in for new systems, there might be a financial advantage to the company to donate them at a higher "retail" price to a local university or technical education entity where they would all run FAH under their management. Along with the computing systems, an amount of cash could also be donated to offset some of the power costs of running the systems. Your company gets kudos for "endowing" a computational biology center and an enormous tax deduction at the same time. Finding a professor or instructor willing to work with you to get their educational institution to build a suitable data center would give you additional ammunition to encourage the public relations/marketing communications group to follow through on the program.

Going down a path like this has several advantages: It gives your company a notable and newsworthy contribution to a local educational institution, provides your company with a huge tax savings, is an ongoing source to dispose of still highly useful computing systems, encourages students to look closer at obtaining an education in computational biology, avoids any political landmines of pointing out the vast amount of unused computing resources in your company, but best of all makes you the hero in this entire endeavor.

Good luck.

[bollix47]

The Executive Summary may be helpful with your explanations of Folding@home to your employer.

[Jesse_V]

If you are concerned about security, check out http://folding.typepad.com/news/2009/06 ... -done.html and you can mention that professional developers write the software. http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-main#ntoc43 describes that F@h uses a great deal of verification and digital signatures.

[bruce]

I commend your desire to convince your company to run FAH and wish you luck. Unfortunately I don't think your chances of succeeding are particularly good, no matter how appealing an argument you can prepare. (It's way to easy for corporate officials to say no.) Nevertheless, you won't know until you try.

[Alan C. Lawhon]

The Executive Summary may be helpful with your explanations of Folding@home to your employer.

Mr. bollix47:

Thanks for posting the Executive Summary. Somehow in all the time I've spent on the FAH web site, I managed to overlook this valuable nugget of information. I'm giving serious consideration to adding the Executive Summary URL to the design of my FAH Business Card. (Right now the only two URLs I definitely plan for the card are the Icrontic.com [Team 93] "flashfold2.html" flash video animation and the FAH "Home Page" URL.) Adding the Executive Summary URL could turn out to be very valuable - especially if the card should fall into the hands of a mid-level or upper-level corporate executive who has the power (and the inclination) to bring FAH to the attention of top management. The primary purpose of a "FAH Business Card" (as I see it) is to recruit and attract individual "retail" donors, but it can't hurt to have something on the card that might get noticed by people in positions of corporate responsibility. Such individuals, if they take any interest at all in FAH, might be motivated to encourage their employees to get involved.