Sprangles

Background

For a long time I used to contribute to the Folding@Home project. I started out just using my desktop machine and my fileserver, but then I realised that I could pick up decent specification machines quite cheaply from ebay, so I started collecting.

Soon I had a little stack of machines running FreeBSD in the corner, folding away. I kept collecting though, and at my peak I had over 20 machines working away in my shed, all neatly stacked up on some cheap shelving.

Shed Setup

They were arranged in two columns at the back of my shed, which is in the back corner of my yard. Good thing too, since they make a bit of noise when they’re all fired up. They put out a bit of heat too — my shed was cosy in the winter and unbearable during the summer days.

I deliberately set up a variety of operating systems on them: Windows Server 2003, XP and 2000 Pro, FreeBSD 6, and a variety of linux distributions (Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo¹).

Monitoring

One machine shared an NFS drive that all the others mounted, and they periodically copied information about themselves (uptime, CPU usage, status of the folding process(es), etc) to that shared drive. I then had another process that regularly processed that data into some JSON which could be viewed using a page with a little bit of AJAX. That meant wherever I was I could view the status of my Folding Farm: at right is a screenshot of it in action.

I folded with the TextDrive team, and as of October 2006 we were ranked 459 of 45935. As you can see, we moved up the ranks quickly until we got amongst the big teams (like Google).

Superseded

In 2006/2007 Folding@Home released a version of their client software for the Sony Playstation 3, and it quickly dominated the Folding@Home results. Keeping 20 odd computers up and working became too much of an administrative overhead (at least one or two of them would freeze every week) so I decided to shut the whole operation down. It was certainly fun and informative while it lasted!

1. Never, Never, NEVER again will I install a Gentoo system! It was liking taking a step back in time to the late 1980s. [back]