[Jsnuff1]

I am currently negotiating the use of my university's computer lab for distributed crunching...but im kinda at a loss because I have no idea how to convince the IT's that is worth me going around thier computers and installing clients that will crunch numbers. If you guys have any ideas it would be a great help.

If i pull this through this will be the cpu power under my control for team macnn

128 ibm p4 2ghz

29 emac g4 700mmz

18 powermacs dual 1.25ghz

Correction: these dualies are actually the new 1.25 gigs

[Scotttheking]

which project, and which school?
I'll help you out with it, as I successfully did that at my last job.

[reader50]

"While installing these CPU testing DC utilities, I will:

• Give a general checkout with TOP to remove the background game servers installed by the students
• Verify that all have properly configured LAN/internet connections
• Clean out the affected crontabs so as to remove the password copy scripts installed by some students
• Install my own higher-quality background game server
• Properly delete all copies of IE to improve system stability
• Install a firewall block against connections to littlebuddy.apple.com
• Optimize the system configuration for maximum fps in common games

Monitoring the number of 'test units' crunched by these CPU test utilities will also reveal if the students have reinstalled the unauthorized game servers."

--------------

That should take care of it.

[Jsnuff1]

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
which project, and which school?
I'll help you out with it, as I successfully did that at my last job.

I'm at boston college, as for which project, with this much computing power i guess i could distribute it to all the projects and make them all crunch on one project whenever the power is needed...you probably know how to best use these comps so just tell me and ill do whatever.

[Shaktai]

My Gawd! With that kind of crunch power even divided equally among 5 projects, that is more than 60 gigahertz per project. Add in the next RC-5 project whenever it releases and you would still have 50+ gigahertz per project. Shoot that would be enough to shore up every project and even dominate a couple.

Good Luck, I hope you can do it.

[Scotttheking]

here's what I put together.
It's not ready to be sent, as I'm waiting for some info regarding how the windows service works.

In the mean time, feel free to edit, make comments, and suggestions.

Dear <insert admin name here>:

I am writing to you to inquire about the prospects of running a distributed computing project on your lab computers in order to utilize their currently unused processing power. Your lab has quite a few machines, and much of the time these sit idle. I, along with the distributed computing team that I am a member of, have been participating in a project that I feel is worthwhile enough to request the use of the computer lab in order to boost the project. This project is called distributed folding. It is run by the Hogue Bionformatics Research Laboratory, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute. Mt Sinai Hospital and the University of Toronto Dept. of Biochemistry. The goal of the project, as stated on their website, which is located at www.distributedfolding.org, is to attempt to produce natural protein folds in the hopes of predicting how proteins fold. They are using this to study what a protein really does. I do not want to bore you with all of the scientific information, but if you would like some more, it can be found at http://distributedfolding.org/science.html.
I would very much appreciate it if you would be willing to let me run this worthwhile project on your lab machines. I feel that the benefits would be twofold. First, you would greatly be helping a worthwhile science project. Second, the username and it's associated organization would reflect our school, bringing some recognition. If you so choose, others could be told about how we are working to further science, which also would bring attention to our school.
If you are willing to assist in this worthwhile endeavor, I propose that we first set up the client on a few machines to test how it interacts with other programs that are run on the lab machines. The client program would of course run at the absolute lowest priority in order to not interfere with any other running programs. The Mac OSX version is a command line application, and the Windows version runs as a service. If it turns out that there is an adverse effect to student work, the client program can be controlled via cron on the OSX side, and the AT command under Windows, in order to run it only at night. I would be negligent to not point out that, like all distributed computing projects, distributed folding does use network bandwidth to communicate with the master project servers. Here also is another advantage that I feel this project has to run in a college network environment. The client can run offline, and then, using scripts, can be triggered to upload, thus allowing us to use network bandwidth only at night, when usage is minimal, and will not interfere with any other usage.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

<put your name>

[Jsnuff1]

awsome, this should work nicely...ill send it today and hopefully ill get an answer by tonight, thanks again scott.

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by Jsnuff1:
awsome, this should work nicely...ill send it today and hopefully ill get an answer by tonight, thanks again scott.

Well, you missed the do not send part.
I posted it for editing and comments, it wasn't done.
I need to rewrite the network part, as this morning I found out that currently the DF windows service cannot be run in offline mode.

[Scotttheking]

http://tsf.dbestern.net/faq.php#q22

There's something, I need to work on it, and no guarantee it works.
Still writing other stuff out.

If you ghost, I'd just try and get it in the image file.
You also have to setup the auto update proxy.

More stuff to follow.