Hello

I am the ICT Manager at an organization with an environmental remit. I am investigating the feasibility of implemeting CPDN across all client machines. I have some initial questions:

Our bandwidth is limited, and somewhat expensive. If we were to deploy across around 50 clients, what bandwidth utilization could we expect?

Our client hardware is moderately up to date (mostly newer than three years old). Can we safely deploy CPDN without adversely affecting users' work?

Are any tools available for centralized deployment? For instance, can default project/BOINC preferences be applied to teams?

If this information exists elsewhere, please accept my apologies, and give me a link.

Many thanks

Tom

Hello

Our bandwidth is limited, and somewhat expensive. If we were to deploy
across around 50 clients, what bandwidth utilization could we expect?

Every Weather at Home (hadam3p) work unit will return between 100 and 250 MB of data.
Every RAPID (hadcm3n) work unit will return ~ 250 MB of data.

In addition each client will need to download the executable from us, together with ancillary files

Our client hardware is moderately up to date (mostly newer than three years old). Can we safely deploy CPDN without adversely affecting users' work?

...in my opinion, yes. You can set BOINC to run only when the computer is not being used for anything else, or between set times of day.
I would suggest that the best way to satisfy yourself as to its performance would be to install it yourself and see what you think.

Are any tools available for centralized deployment? For instance, can default project/BOINC preferences be applied to teams?

...not sure, I don't belong to any teams, and haven't done any large deployments :-(

I did find this...

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=4401
which gives hints about what is possible.


I hope that helps

Jonathan

---

To add to what Jonathan wrote:

Our bandwidth is limited, and somewhat expensive. If we were to deploy
across around 50 clients, what bandwidth utilization could we expect?

Every Weather at Home (hadam3p) work unit will return between 100 and 250 MB of data.
Every RAPID (hadcm3n) work unit will return ~ 250 MB of data.

In addition each client will need to download the executable from us, together with ancillary files

This post describes the network usage of HamAM3P regional tasks in more detail and includes the expected run time for each task.

HadCM3N tasks run for around 3 weeks on my Q6600 XP system.

Our client hardware is moderately up to date (mostly newer than three years old). Can we safely deploy CPDN without adversely affecting users' work?

...in my opinion, yes. You can set BOINC to run only when the computer is not being used for anything else, or between set times of day.
I would suggest that the best way to satisfy yourself as to its performance would be to install it yourself and see what you think.

If you have 500MB of memory for each core BONC applications are allowed to use you shouldn't have any problems (a few BOINC projects do have applications which can use 1GB of memory). BOINC applications are run at idle priority and the operating system will preempt them whenever a user application requires processing time. You can also specify exclusive applications which will cause all BOINC activity to be suspended when they are running.

Are any tools available for centralized deployment? For instance, can default project/BOINC preferences be applied to teams?

...not sure, I don't belong to any teams, and haven't done any large deployments :-(

I did find this...

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=4401
which gives hints about what is possible.

I'm also unaware of of any mass deployment tools. but there are a couple of options you could consider:

1. You could use the same user account for all of the computers. Install on the first one and attach to your selected projects as a new user. Install on other computers and attach as an existing user (you could cut out the attach process on the other systems by copying the account_*.xml files from the BOINC data directory after the first system is running).
   
   
2. If you want to have individual user accounts you can get the preferences as you require for the first system, save them as a local copy in BOINC Manager (with the advanced view's Advanced - Preferences menu item) and copy the global_prefs_override.xml from the BOINC data directory to the other systems.
   

---

"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Ah, yes. Same account for all our machines. That would do it. Thank you.

(OT): What is the difference between the BOINC and PBOINC screensavers? I know the screensavers are frowned on by informed BOINCers, but I'm talking about installing for users who know nothing about this, so there is an educational aspect.

Thanks again

Tom

I haven't heard of PBOINC.
But the BOINC screen saver is a separate program to the science application, and on Windows it can be found in the same place as all of the Windows screen savers.

This program displays graphics images sent to it by the science application, for the work unit currently be crunched.
For those projects without a screen saver image, a default BOINC image of some sort is displayed, and moved around the screen. This also happens on those occasions with there is a problem which prevents the graphics program from accessing the app image.

Note: The science app 'screen saver' is not a real screen saver. It's an image whose position on the screen is fixed.

edit
In your first post you said:

can default project/BOINC preferences be applied to teams?

You need to be careful of terms here.
A "team" is a separate entity to a group of computers "owned" by one person.
Some teams have hundreds of people in them, each with their own separate account, number of computers and country of origin.

I suspect that what you mean is: "group of computers".
And there are lots of people/accounts like that, who have more than one computer. Some are using school/university computers, others are using workplace computers, and some people have just accumulated computers that have been discarded by friends and relatives.

---

Backups: Here