Folding@Home setup in office

Question

Have been wanting to do this for a while but have struggled to find the best way.

I'd like to set up Folding@home to run in our office, between 8pm and 8am each day, and all weekend.

We have a fair few systems now -- 4x 27" iMacs (quad 2.7GHz Corei5 w/ Radeon 6770M). Also have three windows PCs with quadcore corei7s with high end radeons, and a mac mini.

Want to run the folding client daemonized with as little management as possible, and also have the clients run on both the CPU and the GPU.

Any ideas? BOINC seemed like a good option to do this but obviously doesn't support folding@home.

Answer 1

I'd just follow the doc's on installing folding@home/configuring it as a service. Using cron to start/stop the services on OSX & Scheduled tasks on windows seems to be the norm. Not sure where F@h is on dev but you may need to run multiple clients to take advantage of all cores.

You may want to check out InCrease for the mac's. Also, not sure how many folders are on SF, if you don't get many replies I'd x-post on the Folding Forum

simple win start script (scheduled launch @8pm):

net start [SERVICE1 NAME]
net start [SERVICE2 NAME]

stop script:

net stop [SERVICE1 NAME]
net stop [SERVICE2 NAME]

According to this Instructions for OSX script setup are included in the f@h download. You'd just schedule whatever command they have you use to start/stop the script in crontab.

crontab -e
0 20 * * * /sbin/startup command
0 8 * * * /sbin/shutdown-command

More on cron: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/56