Distributed Processing - Requesting Experience

Hello.

I work for a local council and our infrastructure of around 2000 machines all work via citrix. This means that the vast majority of processing power of the client machines is massively under used.

I've been given the go-ahead to looking at distributed processing applications - seti, protein folding, cures, etc - to establish whether we could utilise this spare processing power and give something extra back to our local community who, after all, pay our electricity bills.

What I'm wondering is whether anyone here has had any experience of the applications available and whether they know of any that will fill the following criteria:

- must be able to utilise idle processor time, ie, they must run in the background at all times, not only when the screen saver is active;
- must be able to collate all data into a single point that will be used to transfer the data to source, ie, there should only be one machine with access to the net;

While I'm more interested in human science research that will actually do some good, I'm also open to the idea of commercial/educational projects so for example providing local computer art students with access to a (relatively) powerful render farm. Again, ideas on a postcard.

Can anyone point me in a worthwhile direction?

Thanks.

Goodbye.

Jes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects


http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/
http://pleiad.umdnj.edu/IBM/index.html

Seem to be pretty worthy.

Won't the processors use more power (and thus the electricity bills will rise along with the carbon footprint) if the idle CPU time is used for distributed processing? How about getting them to auto-standby when idle instead?

What Grey said -- you *will* end up using more electricity, which can be a significant expense when talking about 2000 PC's

Pfff council IT staff have no more pressing matters to attend to...? Figures.

Darkheart

Hello.

I'll be taking a look at power consumption, etc, and see how significantly it is affected by this. The points are well made, however. Thanks.

@Darkheart: A certain expression springs to mind but I'm too polite to use it. I'm currently leading on a number of IT projects and, quite frankly, work my backside off giving my all. However, part of my remit is to make best use of IT within the authority and also to make best use of tax payers money. IF I can offer a service which will have low impact on human resources (as it'll be a background task with little human interaction, that qualifies), have a low cost impact (which I'm investigating) and also gives extra value to the community by, ooh I dunno helping to find a cure for cancer, then I think I'll have done my job. Preliminary investigation of validity of ideas is not a waste of time or money, irrespective of the outcome.

Goodbye.

Jes

How about the cost of testing it, deploying it, maintaining it, securing it, dealing with support calls about it, crashes and incompatibility caused by it, network traffic used, power used, man hours, man hours wasted...

Also knowing the way the councils work: the extensive documentation, health and safety, general time wasting, all at the taxpayers expense in addition to the cost of your time (+pension + benefits), investingating, emailing, communicating and getting the required permissions to do it.

This will not "cure cancer" none of these kind of projects will; some of them are not entirely useless and there's certainly no harm in people running them on their home PC's in their own time but mandating it for every council worker is just silly. Personal interests and enthusiasms should not be indulged in the workplace, particularly at the taxpayers expense. Even more so when they are raising people's council tax to record highs AND denying basic services to very vulnerable and/or impoverished people. I get so sick of councils denying things like one hot meal a week to a pensioner with dementia while we see every new council worker with a brand new 21" monitor and leather bound chair.

If you want to do something worthwhile, find a way to reduce your IT budget by 5% and ask it to be reallocated to help vulnerable people to pay their fuel bills this winter. Or alternatively most councils could do something about their data security measures which are usually abysmally bad with few procedures and even fewer enforced.

Sorry for the rant but this is something I feel very strongly about.

Darkheart

It would be cool though if you detected alien transmissions via the SETI software.

I think the BBC had a screen saver that calculated global warming scienaros.

haha, and the irony being that more CPU power and thus more energy was burned to run the calculation!