Folding Forum

I was curious if anyone has considered running notebook farms. I was just thinking about how dirt cheap old used laptops are and since they're all in one, gathering a whole bunch and running them to fold would be fairly easy I imagine. If I did this, what would I need to do, run each one seperately or try to tie them altogether through a main server?

Oh, and off topic, is it possible to run an ATI card and an Nvidia card on the same board for folding purposes?

I've considered it, but don't have a plethora of old notebooks lying around. If the CPUs are reasonable, it would be a low-power way to Fold.

I would consider setting them up in a peer-to-peer LAN using WiFi or wired Ethernet, as needed for your setup. WiFi would take a bit more power, but not likely a dealbreaker. No server necessary; just use FahMon to monitor the individual machines from a handy computer on the same LAN.

DarkElfa wrote:I was curious if anyone has considered running notebook farms. I was just thinking about how dirt cheap old used laptops are and since they're all in one, gathering a whole bunch and running them to fold would be fairly easy I imagine. If I did this, what would I need to do, run each one seperately or try to tie them altogether through a main server?

I have my farmette (four machines, seven cores) and one of the machines is a lappy.

I have it going out the Internet via WiFi.

So definitely try and run them all linked to a main PC?

DarkElfa wrote:Oh, and off topic, is it possible to run an ATI card and an Nvidia card on the same board for folding purposes?

Yes.

So definitely try and run them all linked to a main PC?

Not necessarily...

If one of them is accessible (e.g., in your home office, with the rest in your closet or basement), use it to monitor F@H as you wish, and keep the farm off the workgroup of your regular LAN. Otherwise you can put them in the same workgroup and monitor them from your "main" computer.

If the notebook supports pxe booting, you can also run F@H over the network and use one to ast as dhcp / pxe booter

So how much bandwidth can I expect about 10 of these to eat up? I'd get more, but TBH, I just can't afford more electricity than that on a fixed budget.

Discarded tower PCs are much more common and usually cheaper than older laptops. And you can run the old PCs headless. I don't think old lappys would be the way to go. Older lappies are especially bad at cooling, towers are better. Lappies can't easily be upgraded, old towers are easier to part out or upgrade. Towers are better, IMO.

I see your point there. Now when you say headless, do you mean without monitor or without HDD?

DarkElfa wrote:So how much bandwidth can I expect about 10 of these to eat up? I'd get more, but TBH, I just can't afford more electricity than that on a fixed budget.

Network bandwidth? A few minutes a day, total...

It depends on the speed of the machines, the specific Work Units they each happen to download, and whether or not you enable Large WUs. Smaller ones may be a few hundred KB to a few MBs every day or 3, while large WUs may be up to 10 MBs every few days.

Note also that while tower PCs may be cheaper as 7im stated, they will also eat up a lot more electricity. A notebook may eat 30 Watts or so, while a desktop will seldom be under 100 Watts and may be closer to 200 Watts (or more, depending on vintage and CPU/GPU). If you will have to air condition the place because of them, your cost will rise even higher...

My laptop has a relately slow Core2Duo chip. There are faster ones in the same T2xxx series. Is that an easy upgrade? (I have successfully upgraded CPUs in towers.)

Headless is no monitor, but you can take that further and run just the minimum HW configs. No optical drive, no floppy, no HD, just MB, chip, memory, onboard nic, PSU (shared), and a shelf to put it on. Don't even need a USB if you run a ram drive.