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Major distributed computing...

R

RussianSoldier

Banned
I have roughly 80 AMD XP2500s that sit idle for about 12 hours a day with a T1 connection. I thought about installing the Seti@Home screensaver (or possibly a background type program) on each one. I was thinking about forming my own team and computing to possibly take over the world, but I'd like to get started with something first...
 
First be sure you have permission to run a DC project on those machines then decide which one you want to run.
A client with a service install is the fastest and hardest to notice. Screensavers are slower and easy to spot.
Anandtech could use the help in just about all the projects we run and 80 machines would be a big help
 
Hello RussianSoldier

If these computers are a business or schools, if you formed a new team, you could get other employees or students/alumni to join that team and have an even greater impact for whichever DC project you crunch for.

Or you could just set them all up with Folding @ Home for TeAm AnandTech. Folding @ Home does research to find cures for Alzheimers Disease, Parkinsons Disease, ALS, and other diseases. A truly worthy cause!
 
Hi RussianSoldier!

That's some nice crunching power you're having there..
Those 80 machines would do a fine job cruching for the United Devices project. This project does almost the same thing as F@H, only the major research is cancer.
It's easy to set up, you don't have to look back once.. The server is doing great with almost no outages.
The TeAm of the UD project has over 760 members from which only 10% is actively doing something.
If you could only add let's say 10 computers our team would get a (very) nice boost!
There are some links in this thread (daily stats thread).

Good luck choosing what project you like or if you decide to start your own team! 🙂
 
"I was thinking about forming my own team and computing to possibly take over the world..."

I doubt it with 80 computers 🙂.
 
Hey RussianSoldier! 😉

Firstly WOW thats some serious crunching power! It would be awesome if you would join TeAm AnandTech as this is a great TeAm with awesome TeAmMates! 😀

Then, are you interested in any other project except SETI? (btw I love SETI!) Any project will be thrilled to have you, so here goes my shot. Lifemapper is great project!

[The Science] It uses records of millions of plants and animals in the world's natural history museums and maps where the species has been found and predicts where each species could potentially live, plus everything that goes with it, global climate change, spread of emerging diseases, priority areas for biodiversity conservation.

[The Stats] TA is currently in 6th place and going strong! but we need more power to make it to the top. On those machines, a wu will complete in about 13min with the cli (can run as a service), so no waiting hours for a wu to finish! You can cache up to 200 wu per running client.

Whatever you choose. happy crunching!!! 😀
 
Dang, that is a bunch of power, more than my cluster of 44. You should look at Find-A-Drug too. I joined 45 days ago and have climbed all the way up to 46th place in that short time. You would climb almost twice as fast. This project looks for cure to cancer, HIV, malaria and several other things.

Look at it by clicking www.find-a-drug.org

Be sure to put 2039 in your team field under the general setting in setup.

Thanks
 
Welcome to the TA DC forum.

You could set your group up as a mini-team that processes under Team Anandtech for whichever project(s) you decide to run.

Just make sure you have permission (written is best) to run these projects on those PCs. We don't want anyone losing their job, getting kicked out of school, or even prosecuted (it's happened) over a DC project.

There are a lot of projects Team Anandtech is involved with, and all have their merits. Any of them would welcome your participation, whether you have 1 PC to contribute, or 100. 😀
 
Originally posted by: CyGoR
Hi RussianSoldier!

That's some nice crunching power you're having there..
Those 80 machines would do a fine job cruching for the United Devices project. This project does almost the same thing as F@H, only the major research is cancer.
It's easy to set up, you don't have to look back once.. The server is doing great with almost no outages.
The TeAm of the UD project has over 760 members from which only 10% is actively doing something.
If you could only add let's say 10 computers our team would get a (very) nice boost!
There are some links in this thread (daily stats thread).

Good luck choosing what project you like or if you decide to start your own team! 🙂
Click to expand...

To add to CyGoR's excellent reply: UD has a scheduling service that allows the client to run only when you want it to. If those 12 hours are between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., you can schedule UD to run ONLY during those times, never interfering with work time.
The F@H project can be set up as an invisible service, keeping others from possibly toying around with the client. F@H also has an option to curb the amount of cpu usage each client uses. Say you want the F@H client to use only 50% of the cpu's spare cycles, to make really sure it wont interfere with anyone working on those computers. The F@H client would never interfere, it uses spare cpu cycles, but to be extra cautious and certain, the feature is there to use if needed.
Welcome to the TeAm DC forums.
 
To add to r0tt3n1 reply:

Folding@Home runs as an idle process. On my computer with lots of ram (1 gigabyte), I don't notice any performance hit. The kids even play CPU intensive games and don't notice any performance problems with their game, F@H doesn't get as much work done while they are playing though as it uses only CPU cycles that nothing else is using.

If the computer only had 128 or 256 ram it might be different, I don't know.
 
I'm currently looking into the 80 units. The most they're used for is word processing and maybe some frontpage/light photoshop, and as I mentioned earlier, they're idle most of the time anyway...
 
I'm currently trying out UD on a couple laptops. I've managed to use Windows 2000's service installation wizard to have UD run as an automatic service.

However, I'm concerned that the program might at some time require user intervention. Does UD everprompt or display any messages that would prevent the program from carrying out it's normal operation? Otherwise, I will continue to set up ud.exe as a service.
 
It depends on what kind of internet connection you use. If the client is unable to send/receive new work, it will give a message to the user.
But, the user cannot do anything with it, it's just a 'notice'. Although when setup as a service, I don't know if it would show the message, could make a difference..

Welcome to the United Devices TeAm!!! 🙂:beer:
I hope you'll like the project, for any other questions, just ask! 🙂
 
another question:

Could I have two or more devices with the same name? If so, I could just load the application onto an original computer, and use Symantec ghost to send the disk image to each computer, otherwise, I would have to just configure each client separately...
 
Originally posted by: RussianSoldier
another question:

Could I have two or more devices with the same name? If so, I could just load the application onto an original computer, and use Symantec ghost to send the disk image to each computer, otherwise, I would have to just configure each client separately...
Click to expand...

You should setup each box with a different name.
I have wu's cached on my boxes and have to use an individual name for each cache slot.
For example the box I am currently working on is Barton1 through Barton12.

I imagine if you create you Ghost image before the client has logged in to download it's first wu then You could complete the dialog box on each box setting up each individual name.
 
That's what I was thinking; I'd install the client, but then configure it on each node. Thanks for the utility links, I already see a few that i'll use.
 
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