Hello everyone,

I am wondering whether there are people/businesses out there running the project on a "large" scale.

As a Mac enthusiast, I have been running the project from my equipment at home for a very short period of time and intend to help as much as I can with my little resources.

However, as an IT Manager, I am responsible for a very small network of about 120 PCs, I am naturally wondering whether I should consider using some of our resources for the purpose of helping this project. Since we use "Thin Client Technology" and the Clients are not so thin, we could probably use the spare processing power of our PCs to do something useful.

Before considering this seriously (I am a risk-averse type of guy when it comes to our Business Network), I would like to hear from people/IT professionals who may have deployed the Boinc client in a Corporate environment.

My main concern at the moment is the number of times the PCs would need to access the internet to trickle, I would not want to affect our Network traffic at all and am wondering whether there would be a way of preventing the PCs from trickling until the end of the process or only at a time when it is convenient (during the night for example).

Any experience in the corporate environment and/or suggestions about the trickling bit above will be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

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120 machines is not really small.
However, trickles are not really taxing on network use and they happen at infrequent intervals (three or four times a day on a good machine).
The only sizeable download occurs at the end of a run, which is about monthly, again on a good machine.

My network experience:
I'm only using CP classic on a network with older NT4 machines. (1 trickle a day, > three months per model)
Trickles are very small (1K on CP Classic).
There have been rare problems due to the server being down when a machine had finished a run, which required manual intervention.
The network uses an ISDN 64K connection to the Internet and final upload takes about 15 minutes.

Regarding preventing trickles:
A possibility is to disable network access (in the BOINC File menu).
I do this at home to stop a lot of messages like unable to connect, deferring communications for... when my connection is closed.
But then you'd have to find a way to enable it again remotely.
I'm sure someone has got a script somewhere.

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Hi Frenchy,
it is a good idea to consider putting such resources to a useful project - where i consider CPDN being one of them.
What apply to a small network that some of us running at home may in many aspects apply to a large scale as well so i'm about to share my experience...

As for network traffic, there is about 8MB download of CPDN client for the first time; each other model download takes only 10kb. A trickle is a size of packet so there is no worry about overloading of internet connection at all. Final upload is about 7MB.

On some [older] machines, a HD or RAM demand may be an issue: 64MB RAM /1GB HD space for each running model (on P4/HT multiply by 2 if 2CPU are enabled in BOINC preferences).

A monitoring feature/utility of BOINC client over LAN (such as BoincView) might be very usefull. You can monitor BOINC clients' progress and send commands like "disable network access".

CPDN usually runs with no need for baby-sittings; i got machines running for weeks on 24/7 basis with no need for intervention.

Any farther questions welcomed.
Hope to help.

> Hello everyone,
> My main concern at the moment is the number of times the PCs would need to
> access the internet to trickle, I would not want to affect our Network traffic
> at all and am wondering whether there would be a way of preventing the PCs
> from trickling until the end of the process or only at a time when it is
> convenient (during the night for example).
>
> Any experience in the corporate environment and/or suggestions about the
> trickling bit above will be highly appreciated.

Hi,
I haven't read all this thread, but Vince and ThierryH (from "l'alliance francophone" team) are running CPDN on a large scale (about 200 machines each).
You can try to contact them on the following french forum:

<a href="http://forum.hardware.fr/hardwarefr/Setietprojetsdistribues/liste_sujet.htm">forum hardware, calcul distribué</a> (Vince=Toutsec)
<a href="http://forum.boinc.fr/">Forum de L'Alliance Francophone</a>

I'm sure they will help you, or at least give you little tips to run CPDN on your network.
CPDN doesn't need to trickle a lot in fact, it's the best project when you have a restricted access to internet (I trickle once a week, and it's OK)
A+,
Arnaud

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Arnaud

Thank you guys for your helpful comments. This is highly appreciated !

Looks like I should not worry too much about the trickling aspect after all. However we would have to be careful with the final upload as that kind of file size (7M) multiplied by the number of devices involved would definitely affect our Network performance. There must be a way around this though, I shall work on this.

As you suggested Arnaud, I will get in touch with Vince very soon to find out how he got on with his implementation.

Once again, thanks a lot.

David.

David, if it is of any help - you can limit network bandwidth upload/download rate in your generel preferences so you don't flood your internet connection.
Machines will most probably upload on different time.

Looking forward to see your farm up and running :-)

&gt; Looks like I should not worry too much about the trickling aspect after all.
&gt; However we would have to be careful with the final upload as that kind of file
&gt; size (7M) multiplied by the number of devices involved would definitely affect
&gt; our Network performance. There must be a way around this though, I shall work
&gt; on this.