Folding Forum

You may have already thought of this, I am not sure, but I have an idea for future folding at home clients. I work at a major university and I help run a multi-section course which has its own computer lab. The lab is solely used for this course and is used only 1/3 of the day. The computers are brand new and are on 24 hours a day. Yeah, you know what I am thinking. However, I know there is no way I can talk the powers that be into doing folding in the lab during the time students are in there. If the client could be set to fold between certain hours, say 7 pm and 7 am, it would be great because students wouldn't be present and these computers would still be able to make deadlines easily, perhaps even SMP deadlines. Just a thought!

I'm not sure how, but i believe there is a way to schedule either the client or the client in service mode.

On the other hand, you don't really have to worry about the computers slowing down when Folding@Home is running. FAH is set at "idle" mode, meaning that it automatically throttles down when the computer is in use, so that it doesn't interfere with other programs.

yeh when i was using 100% cpu usage on the 5.04 version i hardly noticed any slowdown, but i've dropped it back to 95% to give it just a bit more responsiveness and i never have troubles anymore.

The main problem is that it causes the fans to kick on high when folding is running hence I don't think they would want it during school hours. I will look into if there is a way to do it as a service. Any other ideas? I would love to get this lab online!

Okay i found one way.

When the service mode is created, create 2 .bat files with the following:

net start "SERVICE NAME" Quote included

and

net stop "SERVICE NAME"

And place that under task scheduler and set the appropriate time and dates.
The only problem is, such .bat files might need admin rights... though i don't know if those are provided under task scheduler.

Fantastic. I will ask the powers that be and see if I can get permission and, if so, I will give it a shot. Thank you so much for your help!