What screensavers? Folding@Home. Would you use one?

[dany2010]

Hi.

 

I remember back at college my lecturer used to put on his machines seti@home.

 

I've just seen folding@home for cancer etc and though that we have about 50 admin machines that stay on and seem to be quite often on screensavers.

 

Would you deploy something like this in your school?

[ChrisH]

I would do but you have to consider how much extra power you are using keeping the machine active all the time considering energy prices these days.

[dany2010]

We tried doing a standby power scheme on the admin but got nothing but hate.

 

The school doesn't seem to worry about energy from my experience. Bit strange.

 

If anyone has any good ones, please share.

[ZeroHour]

Just as a FYI most OS's will downclock the cpu when they are not busy as well as ramping down the fans to reduce the power usage. If you throw Folding at the cpu though that will generate both power usage and probably a fair bit of heat which in turn makes the office a nightmare. In all honesty I would expect you're mean time to failure to go down due to the extended permanent load when idle.

As much as folding etc is good, heat and power savings are better currently generally.

[CAM]

It's for a good cause but do it with your own kit and money, not the school's. It has hidden costs through power plus wear and tear, imagine the head finding out it is costing more for the school and unauthorised! Similar to Bitcoin mining with school machines (except that comes with a whole host of other legal hassles making it a terrible idea!).

[Trapper]

You can't. Precedence of some poor chap in the US who was sacked and then sued by his school district for running SETI@Home on school workstations.

 

In Birmingham it's all blocked anyway, you can't connect to the servers so the only way to do it is to download a package at home, run it, take it home and upload it.

 

Even if the Head agreed, it's still a bit dicey.