Folding Forum

Hi all,

New to FAH.

I'm a sysadmin. Have about 50 servers give or take a couple, a few of which are standby or staging environments and sit essentially unused. Most are heavily utilized during the business day, but sit nearly idle for the 12 hours outside NBH. Most are a mix of Win 03/08 Server with handful of FreeBSD that are being converted to Ubuntu.

Most of these machines are either dual quad-core or dual dual-core servers.

Would we be a good candidate for FAH?

If so, I'm considering presenting this to upper management. I anticipate pushback against any application running in the background on a production machine during NBH. Is it possible to schedule the FAH app to run from perhaps 7pm to 7am, or would that compromise it's utility?

Lastly, are there any marketing materials available, such as a logo we could display or a "certified participant program" or some such? I anticipate that this would be an easier sell to management if we could advertise our altruism, since there doesn't appear to be any tax advantages.

Welcome to the folding@home support forum chrisser.

You can certainly run FAH on both Windows and Ubuntu. Both operating systems have task schedulers so there's no problem running at certain hours as long as the deadlines are met. You may also find that running a CPU client 24 hours a day won't bother your daily processing as the clients will run at a very low priority.

The Executive Summary may be helpful when explaining to upper management:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegrou ... ingFAQ.pdf

If you think that a video would make it easier to get your point across, then here's the official one released this year -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... sJx9z1uB9k

The links posted above are pretty good, but if they'd like a bit more information to help justify running F@h, here's a couple more resources that you might consider:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

If obtaining (written?) management permission, it might be slightly easier to get permission to start "testing" FAH with any of the idle servers, whether they are currently awaiting installation of ubuntu or during that process. (FAH installs easily on Win 7-8 and with a slight increase in complexity on older versions of Windows.)

Since these are servers, they probably don't have GPUs that are supported for folding, but even if they happen to, FAH really only supports GPU folding on Windows. (We expect a GPU version that should work on Ubuntu sometime soon. The Pande Group never gives ETAs for future developments.]

Nevertheless, the FAH would run very well on all those CPUs, whether scheduled for half days or for full days with appropriate permission.