This may be a stupid question but I am just curious... Having seen the awesome power that is put out by servers, why don't more companies fold? Surely its a bit of publicity for them at the very least. Is there any particular reason?
Compliance, Risk and Ethics; in a sentence. Compliance to regulation, Risk against viruses etc. Ethics, companies sole reason to survive is to support the shareholders which means lowering costs and raising Earnings per Share. Research doesn't even come close...unless it supports one or more of the above.
I am actually very much on board with Corporate input when its comes to folding. So many companies do not use 100% of there CPU capacity because they over spec or were lead up the garden path. A friend of mine sells VMware and that's his job to make them use CPU's at 100% 24/7, without increasing hardware costs. Our company doesn't have a server but if it did, you would be damn sure to see on our Website, our contribution to the Stanford projects. To me its just as good as giving money to charity as the end result is hopefully the same. What are your thoughts to starting a new thread for us folders to get our bosses to use up redundant CPU capacity for folding and get Folding@home into the work place and on websites?
That kind of my line of thought surrounding it. Increasing awareness for companies about the subject is surely a good thing?
One of my friends uses folding to Stress test new machines prior to them going into production. Seems a worthwhile and comprehensive test if you ask me....
A combination of a lack of knowledge, lack of interest and most of all lack of will are the main reasons I would imagine. The lack of will that I refer to is their unwillingness to have their hardware doing anything other than absolutely necessary tasks - namely tasks that make them money. This is directly linked to electricity costs. I think Saspro's comment above was him speaking from first hand experience - weren't you forced to relocate your farm a while ago sas? I know if it was my company and I had a server room, I would have no problem putting in an additional rack with a few boxes for folding. But then again that's me. I'd overclock and fold on my toaster if I could...
It maybe something to do with Stanford saying people should not run Folding on production machines...
Then the angle of attack here guys has to be the search engine optimisers for website rankings. Folding@home is linked to face book and every other social networking site on the planet (just about) I would be pitching to them that for a minimal outlay (basing this on using redundant CPU capacity) they could increase the rankings on their website from the increased activity. Besides, folding is a totally selfless contribution to medical research, and would be seen as a " politically correct and just attitude to the greater good of man" (our communities competition is not a selfish gain as it only generates more research for Stanford) Everyone feels better when they give to charity, and most off the time the charities give good publicity as a return for their received donations. Any IT bods who play the " it will slow things down card" should be well informed at the reconfigurability of the programs that fold, to step back the CPU usage when the companies demand is required. I feel an article in our mag forming
My company has a screensaver you can install that folds while you are away from your PC, my issue is i dont want my work laptop to die as without it im crippled. I would say if I owned a company ditto my servers... You just don't do anything these days that can risk service.
I wouldn't recommend folding on a laptop as the cooling is a little haphazard, and they tend to struggle with long gaming sessions let alone 24/7 folding I havent heard about that before and it is an intriguing method for folding. It makes use of the desktop power as well as servers I know folding is stressful for hardware, but in the server world, these systems and components are purposely designed for 24/7 100% activity. If they had good kit it really wouldn't make any difference.
This is an interesting post, I am a little on the fence with it to be honest. I manage the infrastructure team and we are targeted on a 98.9% up time on servers and network and to be honest this is generous vs. some others I know. Having said all of that, F@H is used to burn in our new and recommissioned servers, sometimes they even complete a unit, so a bonus all round. I know ALOT of companies that unbox and go live with hardware on the same day...
I luckily have a very understanding boss at work - 95% of my PPD comes from work kit. Before I joined the company, there wasn't any folding going on. We use F@H to burn-in new developer workstations (these are Xeon X3450s) as well as fold on non-critical production servers and servers that aren't in general use (we're currently investigating slow I/O on KVM so we're not using one of our four dual 12-core AMD servers). As for the reasons why companies don't fold - it's because of the cost of power (luckily our power is inclusive in our building rent, we don't pay per kWh so we can suck as much power as we want), lack of awareness about F@H and lack of the "what's in it for me" factor. Even if all companies didn't pay per kWh for electricity, I'd guess that 80% of them still wouldn't fold because of that last reason. If there was a financial incentive or some other kind of reward, I'm sure a lot more companies would be willing to put their servers to use. Also, a lot of companies run most/all on Windows. It's well-known that CPU folding works best on Linux because of the nice'd processes (F@H will make away for anything that actually needs the CPU). Ultimately, to get companies to fold more, you need to solve those issues - get more exposure in enterprise circulation like Computer Weekly magazine and whatever IT managers read (I'm lucky in the sense that my manager is very tech savvy - it's surprising the number of IT managers that don't know their kernel from their pagefile). The "what's in it for me" could be increased PR that comes from doing some good, and you would need to be in an environment that isn't all about uptime (I wouldn't dream of folding on any public or network-critical server) and that doesn't pay per unit for power. Unfortunately that rules out 95% of businesses
All these big office blocks that can have a couple of hundred pc's running all day using the cpu client on minimum would help but as others have said if it costs money no one will do it. some i've been at leave a lot of their pc's on 24/7 just to save loading times in the morning so those ones might not bother about cost to much.
Before retiring, I worked for one of the hated massive multinational oil corporations. There is absolutely no way they would even consider this in a million years!! Even internet access was restricted to an absolute "needs only" basis. Computers were for business use only. If you downloaded anything which fell outside that criteria then collect your P45 on the way out.
