100+ macs

Hi all, for my senior thesis/capstone project I'm thinking of adding 100+ of the macs at our school. I'll have to run this by the IT administrator first, but I'm choosing to assign these macs to the Bit-tech team. F@H will be running when the computers are idle so the users wont be hit with a performance loss. What do you all think?

 

Ermm go for it?! Good luck getting them to say yes though!

 

our school is kinda different, a requirement of senior thesis is to help people or community service. If I can get a lab ~25 Core 2 Duo imacs I'm good with that.

 

Sounds like a good plan mate if you can get IT to go with it although I have no idea how good the mac client is or what sort of PPD the clients can do on a C2D?

Best of luck with it though

 

Whatever contribution you add llamafur will be very welcome to the team and project as a whole.

BTW, the CPU clients are written so that they dial back themselves when a foreground application needs the CPU(s) resources. As a result, you should be able to fold on the machines during the day, not just when the computers are idle.

 

That sounds like an excellent place to study! I wish I could use something like that as a final year project at university. The small lab we do our C programming in alone just upgraded from about 50 northwood P4 machines to 38 Dell's running C2D E7400's and 10 or 12 more powerful machines with Q6700's. Imagine that lot folding

I say go for it! If you need any material to present to the staff at your school, have a look on the stanford folding website. They have corporate material that is prepared for you and downloadable for this sort of thing. Best of luck with it!

 

yep just install the clients as a service and the second the machines are on they will fold away logged in or not!

and as mentioned they scale back when actually being used so performance is not an issue- i run two cpu clients on core 2 machines and not had any performance issues, so go for it!

 

thanks for the input, how much power and internet bandwidth will folding eat up?

 

All of it, and hardly any

 

Ok, well the school is paying for it. shouldn't make much of a difference in there bill, I hope.

 

Never had a Mac but they look realy cool the new slim ones's, trouble is santa never brings me what I ask for anymore

 

Are they the new iMacs? If so, I wouldn't have thought they have much in the way of cooling a CPU that's under load most of the time. I could be wrong, and having never owned one I am hardly the most appropriate person to be making such a suggestion, but you might want to check the temps on one of them whilst folding before installing the client on all of them, just to be sure you're not going to overheat every machine in your computer lab

 

the power use shouldn't go up to much as the machines are already running.

 

We have the machines folding when idle during the day as well as over night at our school (not as many machines as we will have eventually, but we are on our way) would be very interesting to see how well 100macs do.

Best of luck to you, look forward to seeing your stats.

 

They'll use more power when folding. Quite considerably more too. When idling, my 850W Antec Quattro powered quad 8800 rig sucks a mere 150-160W from the wall. When it has all four GPU2 clients running on the overclocked cards, it draws well over 550W (sometimes close to 600 depending on the Project it's working on) - the inefficient as ever AMD X2 CPU in there may be something to do with that too, but mainly it's those power hungry cards. I would imagine the same goes for the CPU client. More load on the CPU = more load on the PSU = more power drawn from the wall.

 

last summer we got a new computer lab with ~25-30 24" imacs 2.66 ghz
and we have 2 exsisting labs with ~30 20" imacs 2.66 ghz, and the multimedia lab with 25 20" 2.66 ghz. How did the school pay for it?$175,000 Donation just scroll down a little.

 

But no "iMac pyramid" picture?

That's a heck of a donation, though. Awesome stuff!

 

Quite the donation. I wish someone would dedicate $175K to my University for technology, but then I never get to use the Mac labs anyway. They're reserved for IMD (interactive multimedia design) students etc. We get to code on the Dells :/

Incidentally, about a year ago the University did the same, bought well over 30 iMacs for those IMD labs. Not sure of the specs but I do know they look pwetty!

 

My first step is to write a letter of intent. We have no school on monday so I have extra time to do it.

 

If you want, you can post the letter on here on Monday and let us have a read through it. We'll proof read it for you and make sure that the bits relating to folding are all ok