Business case for distributed computing

[desy]

Climate predition is one of the involments of our PHD scientist guys, and he asked if using BOINC and whatnot is possible through our LAN infastructure

I told him maybe, but I was wondering if anybody has ever thrown together a business case advocating the use of DS for a large organization that I could crib from?

Figured lots of DS geeks here that could point me the right way. . .

 

[office boy]

Well I've never done a business case, but for the 15 or so PC's at the local utility district that I work at DC has always been a about 2 things.
Using resources that are otherwise unused to better science or humankind in some way.
And as a way for me to judge the system performance of various PC's. I can find users who are breaking stuff. PC's with spy ware and other junk installed on them. PC?s with failing components (even if they don't cause errors) ALL from performance statistics.

Used to be Seti, and now I'm running FAD, I've never had a manager question that these things should be running on our systems after giving them this explanation.

I've even convinced some vendors that it was a good thing.

With that said I don't run it on every system, Our main DB system runs it. But even i won't touch our critical scada control systems.

 

[Ken g6]

Are you asking about running clients for the climateprediction.net project, or about setting up a project of your own? Most people here know only about running clients. If that's what you want, put climateprediction in your subject, and someone will be along to help you with that shortly.

But if, as it looks like, you want to set up your own in-company project, not many people here know about that. The best I can do is point you to a page of development platforms, and warn you that grid computing may not be the best way for you to do climate prediction. Climateprediction.net doesn't actually parallelize individual climate models; instead, they are testing many different climate model possibilities by parceling out one to each machine. Each machine then runs its climate model all the way to the end and reports only the end results.

 

[desy]

Its not so much for our own beneift as it would be for the benefit of man.
We are an evironemental government agency 'Canadian' and the gov't has mandated climate change as 'important' quite willing to jump into KYOTO

OK , here is one way where where we can put our money where the mouth is.
The PHD is doing the social and scientific benefit of supporting climate prediction
I'm going to provide the technical , yes we can and here is the impact on the network of doing such a thing

 

[Spacehead]

I haven't tried any BOINC projects yet but i believe all computers need to have internet access to send/recieve work. No getting work from a central server at your end.

Climate Prediction work unit downloads are fairly large, i've heard, so bandwidth may be an issue, depending on how many computers your talking about. Not sure about the results upload size.

As office boy pointed out, DC programs are a good way to test & to make sure your systems are running in good shape.

Get written permission before running a project on computers that aren't your own. Especially if they're goverment computers.



Don't forget to join the TeAm 😉 🙂

 

[mrwizer]

Originally posted by: Spacehead
I haven't tried any BOINC projects yet but i believe all computers need to have internet access to send/recieve work. No getting work from a central server at your end.

Climate Prediction work unit downloads are fairly large, i've heard, so bandwidth may be an issue, depending on how many computers your talking about. Not sure about the results upload size.

As office boy pointed out, DC programs are a good way to test & to make sure your systems are running in good shape.

Get written permission before running a project on computers that aren't your own. Especially if they're goverment computers.



Don't forget to join the TeAm 😉 🙂

You can run BOINC through a proxy server, so all computers do not need direct access to the net. Yet there is not a queue server like seti classic. The WU's with CPDN are fairly large, yet they take a while to complete, so you are not constantly uploaded/downloading data. The trickles for credit are small I think.