Why Folding On School Computers Isn't Such A Ridiculous Idea

[vanished]

I just down clock my r9 290x to 900/1150.

That wouldn't have the same effect.  I wouldn't be limiting it for the purposes of working the card less, I'd be limiting it so as to leave some power available for general use of the machine.  The "pause on use" or "work on idle" or whatever its called gets a similar effect, but that means it's folding 100% while it's not in use and 0% while it is, when it could still be folding at like 90% without bothering me.

[FAQBytes]

just fyi, dust can catch on fire

i highly doubt anything you do at school uses those computers at 100%

unless running prime95 or other stress tests is part of your curriculum lol

http://www.cemp-international.it/index.php?sub_section_id=38&action=page

Carbon has the lowest dust layer flash point at over 200C. Far higher than 100C.

Cotton has a flash point of 210C, and human flesh (a primary component) has a much higher flash point than that.

[itsmyjobtoknow]

As a person who used to wonder if it was worth it, I completely see where you're coming from. Most of the computers at my school are core 2 duo e6600s.

On abuse of hardware, light (50%, no GPU) isn't too abusive according to physics. While you might hold different feelings toward the matter, these chips aren't overvolted. They're operating at or under rated voltage. The on 24/7 is still hard for me to stomach as it's still a bare motherboard sitting on a cardboard box. I don't view it as abusive, but like I said, I see where you're coming from.

The hardest part is in fact the proving of its worth. This isn't helped by the fact that we are still yet to have where the first large few batches of research studies assisted by this are to come out. These things take many years of effort and much longer for the experiments to go through, be tested, then peer reviewed and published. This is where looking at other, smaller DC projects is important. One BOINC project sorted through 6,000,000 different molecules to fight cancer and the scientists are now testing the 8 that "show great potential of being a true cure" for a specific type of cancer in adolescents. Once these are (hopefully) successful and then publicized, I think public opinion will change.

 

I completely 100% agree with what you have said. 

 

But you also have to look at this in another prospective 

 

What if your friend came to your house to use your computer. While he/she is using your computer, he installed a program that allows him to mine bitcoin or whatever currency it is that is popular at a set percentage without you knowing. And now it is running that said program without your knowledge.

 

How do you feel about that? 

 

Now you see that scenario, replace your friend with students that may or may not be reckless with computer hardware, and replace your computer with college equipment. And now times those students by at least a thousand on a given day of students going in and out of labs, for 2-5 hour lab sessions.

[FAQBytes]

I completely 100% agree with what you have said.

But you also have to look at this in another prospective

What if your friend came to your house to use your computer. While he/she is using your computer, he installed a program that allows him to mine bitcoin or whatever currency it is that is popular at a set percentage without you knowing. And now it is running that said program without your knowledge.

How do you feel about that?

Now you see that scenario, replace your friend with students that may or may not be reckless with computer hardware, and replace your computer with college equipment. And now times those students by at least a thousand on a given day of students going in and out of labs, for 2-5 hour lab sessions.

I already updated the original post to clarify who would be using it.

Hopefully there would be enough of a desire to do this to where Stanford and Berkeley would make custom school ones that are automatically set to just run CPU at 50%.

I'm not pushing for students to do this, as I wouldn't trust half of them to know how to cook ramen, let alone run F@H on a computer they know nothing about.

As the schools at the ones that set it up, they know everything about what is going on. Sorry that I forgot to clarify this explicitly. As I said, this is for a Student Congress bill, and is addressing the concerns of the people in the session as well as those here. It would be run by the State, county, and school, and it would be up to them how far they want to take it.

Thank you for voicing your concerns.

[Bajantechnician]

You say machines will be obsolete by the time they declay one year, but there are some campus (mine being one of them) that doesn't get rid of their old machines unless they have to. Some of the labs that aren't using CPU heavy application such as Auto-CAD, are still rocking Core 2 Duos. Heck there is still a Pentium 4 somewhere around Campus. 

 

As an employee of my Office of Technology....it is also considered abuse of hardware (at least in my opinion). 

 

And not everyone shares the same opinion about folding as you and the rest of LTT does. To some, folding may be the most pointless thing ever.

my cad pcs at school have 2000 series quadros and $300 xeons.

 

our computer lab cost the school over $100,000, including the 3d printer and such

[RaspberryPi]

This made me LOL so much

 

Basically, we have laptops at school with completely overkill processors (core i7), terrible battery life, not enough ram, and a puny hard drive (the lack of SSD kills me). Soooo, what I do is as soon as I finish my work (so I have enough battery to get it done), I fold @ 100%, using the nacl client. I then plug it in, set it so closing the screen doesn't turn it on suspend, lock the screen and fold. Now that's all well and good, but I convinced all my friends, and even the librarian to set it up.

I'm either doing that on the school laptops, pulling the back of it and inspecting, or turning my friend's screen off, or crashing their computer with ~400 calculators open if they fail to comply to my folding requests.

Forcing people to donate computational power to charity, it normally works.

[RevoltTrain]

I used to do it all the time. I ran the MacBook Pro they gave me with F@H open whenever I was using it in class, or when I was using it at home.

 

Still have that MacBook Pro and use it for F@H running Windows 7 now

[baxtmann]

Sounds legit

[C0LL0SS0S]

there should be a NGO that cleans out PCs for the School so they can fold, sounds stupid at first but it really isn't

[poker1059]

Running that FAH on my Chromebook... Max power... For 5 hours a day... Task Manager say that the tab uses 160 of the CPU. I assume that means 80% total since there's two cores and 160 over two cores is 80? but idk, I'm not a chromebook techie 

[Stadin6]

i could probably do this at my school. just gotta ask the teacher responsible for all the computers first (he isn't really a IT guy). although my school doesn't have so many computers as other schools there are a bunch of old computers collecting dust.( including a 5 year old xeon server with 16GB of DDR2 ECC RAM). 

[Bajantechnician]

Our school sets the computers on different signins.

 

admin and studnt.

 

you can only donwload and run applications in admin

[vanished]

Running that FAH on my Chromebook... Max power... For 5 hours a day... Task Manager say that the tab uses 160 of the CPU. I assume that means 80% total since there's two cores and 160 over two cores is 80? but idk, I'm not a chromebook techie 

Could be using the unix way of reporting processor usage.  100% of one core is shown as 100%, so if you use 4 cores of a quad core, it is 400%

[Lolucoca]

Would be pretty cool... But those Pentium 3's are not really good for folding Especially in germany where 1 KW/h is like 45 cents

[Derpologist]

folding on my celeron chromebook (its a chromebook so no anyway) and a dozen 2010 iMacs? 

 

 

 

K

[RaspberryPi]

Our school sets the computers on different signins.

 

admin and studnt.

 

you can only donwload and run applications in admin

If you have chrome installed (it is preinstalled on the school computers @ my school) visit folding.stanford.edu/nacl

[comefightme]

sounds like a good idea but the only proble is CPU folding is VERY inefficent. I could see 30 library computers only generating as much folding power as a GTX 980 ti.

Definitely need more than 30 school cpus to get 980ti performance

[vanished]

 

Our school sets the computers on different signins.

 

admin and studnt.

 

you can only donwload and run applications in admin

 

 

If you have chrome installed (it is preinstalled on the school computers @ my school) visit folding.stanford.edu/nacl

 

The idea is that the school would organize and decide to do this or not as a whole - he's not suggesting random students individually just start installing F@H under the nose of the admins

[comefightme]

especially at my school. At my school we are still using pentium D machines from 2005. 2005! I mean seriously our school computers are 10 years old and are the slowest pieces of crap ever!

Who cares, it's just school computer, it's not like you use it for anything

[comefightme]

dude it takes two minutes to open google chrome! Many of those computers have windows 7 on them and are so slow that many students choose to bring in their own laptops.

What do u use it for?

[comefightme]

uhh using google docs on the computers. Even that is so slow the text cursor freezes every few seconds.

Just do it at home

 

Where are you from?

[Bajantechnician]

If you have chrome installed (it is preinstalled on the school computers @ my school) visit folding.stanford.edu/nacl

school uses windows

[LionWaffles]

Yes. Folding on Google Chromebooks, iMacs that are so old, they can't even run Mountain Lion, or on shared (by 6-30 people) machines with the following specs: i5, built in graphics (I think), 2gb ram

 

Very feasible indeed.

[vanished]

especially at my school. At my school we are still using pentium D machines from 2005. 2005! I mean seriously our school computers are 10 years old and are the slowest pieces of crap ever!

 

 

folding on my celeron chromebook (its a chromebook so no anyway) and a dozen 2010 iMacs? 

 

 

 

K

 

 

Yes. Folding on Google Chromebooks, iMacs that are so old, they can't even run Mountain Lion, or on shared (by 6-30 people) machines with the following specs: i5, built in graphics (I think), 2gb ram

 

Very feasible indeed.

 

You do realize some schools actually have good computers right?

[Derpologist]

You do realize some schools actually have good computers right?

Yes, we used to have macbooks a few years back. Nowadays they wouldn't be powerful enough to do shit (and still arent, they are found here and there at my high school), but back then, were powerful.