Folding at home / distributed computing

[caffrey]

Does any schools use this during out of school hours? The head of ICT has asked the head if he can and asked me of the caveats. The main one I can think of is power usage (The ICT suite is still using Pentium 4s)

[Chris_]

I haven't done any calculations, but the performance from a room a Pentium 4s will be pretty poor and the power usage will be huge, you'd be better off buying some more modern desktop or multi cored server and running it on that instead.

[caffrey]

That's what I thought, and told them. I'll need to bring a wattage meter from home and try it out and do some maths - then again I'm not the one paying the bills but I could accidentally bring it up with the facilities manager...

[LincolnE]

I'd stay away from this idea, I'm afraid. I can just see it causing more issues further down the line.

 

Problems

1: Power Useage. Leaving computers on full load will cause more power consumption, leading to higher bills. With cash strapped schools, this isn't something that you can justify. Also, given the funding comes from the public purse, you'd have to be fully justified to governors and everyone else (Given potential Freedom of Information Act Requests) if asked if you contribute towards these.

2: Load on computers. Most computers aren't designed to be run at full load for extended periods of time. Even gaming machines running generally don't that long at full load without cooldown. The potential for prolonged overheating and other issues might break machines more quickly than you would like. (Certainly given how fast P4's can go with age).

3: Heat. If you've ever run a single machine on full load overnight, you'll notice how quickly the room will get hot. Times this by however many machines you have and you'll soon have issues.

 

Also, regardless of if you are a school or not, you might have a few police look into this. A mix of the late night power consumption and heat generated (if they ever looked into it) might make a few heads turn and think you're growing something that you shouldn't have. I've known friends to have police storm their offices and homes before when they've been doing bitcoin mining and other high CPU/GPU activities.

[caffrey]

I thought about the heat issues too, the room will be on fire in the morning!

[Roberto]

I haven't done any calculations, but the performance from a room a Pentium 4s will be pretty poor and the power usage will be huge, you'd be better off buying some more modern desktop or multi cored server and running it on that instead.

 

I'll say. Pentium 4s? Never mind buying a few desktops, why doesn't the head of IT see if anyone has an ipad or a samsung phone they're not using or something if he really needs that much computing power.

[caffrey]

I'm tempted to try just for a giggle