[Beowulf] Folding at Home on a Beowulf?

[Brian R Smith]

Not really a beowulf question, but i'll bite.  Some time ago, we had a 
condor grid at my center with some pretty wild machines.  The problem 
was that no one had any use for it (they were obsessed with running 
their projects on our beowulf despite the fact that they were mostly 
single processor jobs).  So i decided i'd run folding at home on 6 of the 
nodes, just to put them to use somehow (I usually use one of our _true_ 
beowulfs for my work and anything serious). 

Just set up f at h on each machine, giving each a different machine id 
number, 1-6 should suffice.  As for getting the data sets, you should 
probably find some way of getting these nodes online... Do you have a 
switch or some extra ethernet ports?  Maybe use one of the machines as a 
router?  You could also whip up a script that would "pretend" to be each 
instance of a machine id (1-6), receive the data, then place it in the 
proper directory in each node.

Your script would run on a machine with internet access.  It would start 
a copy of f at h as a particular machine id (i think you can do this by 
feeding it different config files).  Once it has retreived the data, 
kill the process, move the data to one of your nodes and repeat.  As for 
sending the data back... i'm at a loss. 

Its been a while since I've run this, as it is more of a distributed 
computing project than a beowulf-ready application, so i might be a 
little off on this.  However, you get the general idea.

-brian

Jake Thebault-Spieker wrote:

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>Does anybody have any experience with Folding at Home
>(http://folding.stanford.edu)? I'd like to run it on my six node 133MHz
>CPU, but my cluster won't be online. Is there a way to get the folding
>jobs another way? Like downloading them at a different location, then
>transferring them to the cluster?
>
>- --
>I think computer viruses should count as life.
>I think it says something about human nature
>that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive.
>We've created life in our own image.
>- --Stephen Hawking
>
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>Jake Thebault-Spieker
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