Does anyone know the expected bandwidth usage?

LagPacket

My mother works for a College in Vermont, and I told her about the Folding@Home project. She's very much so into science (she has a Master's in Environmental/Biological somethingoranother... whatever it is it's way over my head!) and was very exhuberant about the project! She works for the science department, and had heard a little about Stanford's project, but I don't think she knew it was an open project that anyone could participate in.

When she found out exactly what it was she was able to plug it a little bit to some members of the IT department up there. They sounded interested but were concerned about how much bandwidth it could use up. The state provides a broadband (I forget the exact type) trunk to the school but they seem to think the folding program would use up most if not all of it. I honestly never bothered to figure out exactly how much bandwidth the program uses but I did find out that their base systems installed all around the college were all roughly around 800MHz.

Does anyone know the rough bandwidth usage of an 800MHz Intel folding machine? They are all base setup Gateways, Compaqs, Dells, etc. Sorry I can't give too much detail about the computers but they have quite a few varying units installed on their campus. I'm thinking if I could find the usage draw of one machine as an estimate, then I could find out how many machines they had up there, and maybe be able to convince the IT department to start installing folding services in the machines.

If it worked at this campus with no problems then I'm fairly sure I might be able to get them to propagate it to their other five sister colleges... wouldn't THAT be nice?

mmonnin

First of all it doesnt use the internet all the time, only when it transfers WUs.

Not sure what they are now but not as much as gromacs used to be. I think its like 200-300 down and a few more up.

See if they will try it on a few computers to test it out.

Since they are 800mhz machines they should still have SSE, my P3 does. Not sure if celerons do at that speed. So give them gromacs.

muddocktor

Figure around 1 MB upload and 200-300k download for every Gromacs WU processed average. I figure that an 800 MHz P3 would have maybe 10MB data transfer per week maximum per machine in a most optimum folding envirenment, ie; very little usage, on 24/7, folding Gromacs through the use of the -advmethods flag.

My P3 1 GHz laptop can fold around 4-5 of the 50 points Gromacs WU's per week with little interruption. An 800 P3 would be a little slower than my laptop.

seversphere

also remember they will be transferring at different times and rarely if ever all at once or even a majority at the same time since work units vary in completion time. So if they have a monthly limit then it might be a problem otherwise even a T1 could handle it.

LagPacket

So to be on the safer side I'd be looking at:

5 WU's a week per machine, with 1Mb upped and 300K downed per WU. So (unless I'm a total moron) each machine would be expected to run about 5Mbs of data outbound, and 1.5Mbs of data inbound every week? That's (practically) nothing! Of course I still don't know exactly how many machines they have on campus, so it could potentially add up to quite a bit of bandwidth, but I'm fairly sure they wouldn't install the folding utils on every machine. Most likely I'm looking at them getting the Science wing and the library running with the folding app. To my knowledge it's under 100 machines. It could be a tough sell especially after last year, when they had problems with students filesharing MP3s.

I knew the machines only ever used the net when they retrieved new WUs and sent in results from those WUs, but I still wasn't sure exactly how much of the network it used. Is there any way to limit the amount of bandwidth each machine will use? Something like if the machine sees the network is extremely busy it won't try to send/recieve, or maybe it will only send/recieve between certain timeframes?