Large folding farm

[martynbez]

hi all,

I know this is my first post but keep with me here!

I work at a school and we have just had over 500 brand new dell dual core 3ghz pc installed! so we have been folding for a while now but we are looking and making the process more streamlined. At the moment we have to install the folding smp client by hand on each pc (to get it to install as a service) and config each one to go out via our firewall.

Now what we want to do or hope is possible is to have a central folding collection and sending server! so that we can point each client to look at the server to collect it's work and then send it back to the server to send it off!

so any ideas????

[toTOW]

First point to clarify : do you have authorization (written is better) to install the client on those machines ?

[batman113]

On this matter i attend a school where we are looking into running fah as a service on a few computers and see how it goes. I s there any way of "pushing" it out on to multiple machines woth the correct configuration settings?

[P5-133XL]

Private distribution and collection servers are not supported. I suspect that the main reason is the potential for cheating. At one time (When there were deadlineness projects, one could collect up to 8 WU's at a time, but that went away when those projects disappeared. With convential projects, what happened was that people would filter out any projects that didn't have optimum PPD causing severe delays and thereby slowing down the science.

[shatteredsilicon]

I'm not sure I understand what would having a local proxy cache for WUs achieve. Can you explain why you think this would be useful?

If you are installing the machines you may be able to slipstream the SMP client in with the custom install disc.

If you are creating the machines from an image, then provided you have the SMP client already configured in the image, it should "just work". This is probably the easiest option.

[Drugless]

If you are creating the machines from an image, then provided you have the SMP client already configured in the image, it should "just work". This is probably the easiest option.

As you say will save heaps of time!
Does the SMP client store the UserID in Windows Registry like the other clients or does Deino/Mpich handle it differently through the user login? I messed up initially with my GPU machine images. Science was done but I didn't get the credit since UserID was same across the 6 machines.
If so do what someone else suggested. Search for 'Folding' and 'UserID' in registry and delete it before the client runs the first time. Maybe a little more complex if running as a service though.

[shatteredsilicon]

AFAIK Windows client also stores settings in client.cfg, same as the Linux versions, so this shouldn't be a problem, provided you configure the correct client.cfg in the source image.

[martynbez]

First point to clarify : do you have authorization (written is better) to install the client on those machines ?

yeah we have all this all ready and the school are keen to support it!

one of the problems is folding never went on the original image so does need to have the service added (bit of a pain).

i can understand the point about cheating with local server's though!

[HaloJones]

Not wishing to prevent lots of valuable computing time but does your school understand the power costs of 500 24/7 folding machines?

[martynbez]

yeah they are all new efficient dell's! we have been folding for sometime just want to stream line the process's!

[Tigerbiten]

AFAIK Windows client also stores settings in client.cfg, same as the Linux versions, so this shouldn't be a problem, provided you configure the correct client.cfg in the source image.

The main difference between Linux and Windoze clients is that Linux stores the UserID in the machinedependent.dat file and Windoze stores the User ID in the registry.
The client.cfg file is the same between OS's and it stores the Machine ID.

If you are going to make a ghost image in Windoze, you must remove the User ID from the registry before you make the image.
Otherwise Stanford cannot tell the computers apart, so you end up folding duplicate work for zero points.

Luck ...........

[shatteredsilicon]

If you are going to make a ghost image in Windoze, you must remove the User ID from the registry before you make the image.
Otherwise Stanford cannot tell the computers apart, so you end up folding duplicate work for zero points.

Fascinating. How is this handled with the Linux client? What's the UserID actually for?

[uncle_fungus]

On Linux it's simple. Don't copy the machineindependant.dat and you'll be fine.
The UserID itself is used to uniquely identify your client(s) to the servers. The UserID and MachineID are combined to produce the "CPUID" that gets recorded by the servers.

[anandhanju]

martynbez, the SMP client does not support restricting the CPU usage. It runs at full throttle all the time which may not be suitable for a school environment. Were you running the CPU (single core client) earlier? If so, I'd go for 2 copies of the same on each machine, with max CPU set to 90%.

[shatteredsilicon]

It doesn't matter that it doesn't support CPU throttling. You can still set it to run at lowest possible priority, which does the job even better.