Well we have finally got it up and running, in no small part due to my ever keen tech guy at school. So far we have 34 active processorts and could be looking at up to 100 being recorded over the weekend. We are registered under the name of what we believe our school will be called next year (we are becoming an academy) which for those who are interested and want to see how our initial progress is picking up is: De_Warenne_Academy We are stress testing 100 machines this weekend to see if they can take the client without issues and if it turns out good we should have these machines folding in the background during the school day with some of the none essential servers running 24/7 in the background (this we are testing and yet to confirm yet). You can see the our starting stats at: http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=457593
Excellent news. I hope this gives some encouragement to others on the same path. Welcome to the fold.
Welcome aboard spt I was wondering who the new player in town was when you got a 20K update. Hope all is going well with the testing this weekend.
Hope so, but not seen any numbers come through from the machines as yet, was hoping some of them would of had a result or two submitted today. The credit has to go to my tech though, I only told him what to do, he did the actual doing.
5430 points to come over the next 5 hours. Linux distro's to become active tomorrow. Two P4's out of 60 have overheated. The others need "adjusting". Sorry for short hand - on iPhone having a BBQ party thingy! I shall not fail the team! And thank you SPT!
Hi chaps and chapetts! I have been setting up a "Folding-Server" using "Fold-Server". Has anyone had any experience with it? For those that may not be aware of it, Fold-Server is a linux distribution based on DSL (Damn Small Linux) and allows you to boot networked computers into a PXE linux environment where you can fold. The nice thing about it is that work directories are stored on the server so you can reboot a client machine to use say a Windows OS (which is untouched due to the network boot) or whichever OS you may have installed. When you want to use the machine for folding again, boot from the network and away you go! This solution does also provide a CD and floppy disk image should network boot be an issue. With no offence intended as I fully appreciate the Fold-Server project was voluntary, I had to do the male thing and fling the instructions over my left shoulder to get it to play with the current network. I'm trying all sorts of combinations in order to get the best performance from the machines as possible as each of the rooms has different hardware. Anyways, I have a few friends interested in folding now! The cause means quite a bit to them as it does me so although we may not be big puters, we're seeing how many wives I can upset by building racks to go into garages! Will see what graphics cards we stumble across!
and within the next 7 hours, we should have bagged team Custom PC a nice 20815 points (ish) over 23 work units (ish).
Well done for getting your school to play ball! It's no mean feat, and one that I have so far been unable to achieve. I will keep trying though, there's at least 600 PC's in that university going to "waste" at night time
We have SPT to thank for that! I guess it is a bit of a difficult job really convincing the uni to look at the route of folding since I suppose "officially" the computers are actually turned off at night? Then again, I would have thought that a university would have promoted it's involvement with such a project to the n'th degree. Deployment shouldn't be a problem with a university network though especially with the extra software packages that they will have available to manage the network.
the machines in the "public" uni PC labs (that's the ones any student can use, not specialised EE programming or rendering labs) and the LRC - Learning Resource Centre [2 floors of 200 PC's each) start up automatically at 8am and shut down at 10pm daily. The servers, however, are run 24/7 and considering that there is significantly less network traffic for about 10 hours per day whilst the public machines are off, there's a lot of processing power going to waste. It's really this that I wanted to try and put to use, but I hadn't much luck convincing anyone to go for it. I may try again this September, with a more formal approach in the form of an arranged meeting with the head of IT at the campus.
Some how i don't think that would happen gareth lol a) our college probably won't do it b) the computers are so slow already c) would take 10yrs before we got any points lol
You guys sound seriously enthusiastic about getting it setup! And good on you! We are getting there with our setup but there is still some work to do. Not that I'm putting stops into you guys getting the uni / college involved but here are some possible constraints from the IT department's point of view (Not from my posistion but just possibilities). At our establishment, we have a VLE allowing staff and studnets to log in and remotely access their work, timetables, task lists, assignment controls etc etc. This is in our case a single linux box which then connects to Active Directory for user authentication. So already, external access is required meaning that the domain controllers need to be available. It's probably a bad idea to fold on your domain controllers anyways....... but I have! Our VLE also provides a secure gateway facility. This allows people to log onto to a bank of computers within our building to use applications and copmlete work. This now introduces the VLE server, domain controllers, and a bank of computers to allow people to log in. I suppose there is the "you cannot fold on client machines as people log in" but on the other hand, should you have a remote gateway facility, I would place money on it being a Terminal Server that you have setup which is effectively a beef'd server to emulate a workstation. OK, and now if I'm honest, there is folding on our servers, folding on quite a few computer suites now... Anything is possible and folding hasn't presented any security issues, reduced any performance on any of the computers and testing the VLE externally has shown that there has been no decline in performance. If I'm honest, things have become quicker because folding outlined simple improvements that could be carried out on servers and workstations to improve performance. Not sure but they should give it a bash with a computer suite of some description! Good luck guys!
we have a vle too http://vle1.peterborough.ac.uk/ and all the computer require logins im not sure what a domain controller is but when were on computer not on the network we have to loging using peterborough\####### - usernumber.
