Maximum PC

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, but the official folding@home forums seemed to just be full of people complaining about their client not working, so I'll put this here instead.

I'm currently working as an intern network engineer/administrator at a hospital in The Netherlands.

To me a hospital is the perfect place for a folding@home project, letting an AFK doctor's computer help cure diseases while the doctor is out curing diseases!
Since it has over 3000 clients that just sit idle a lot of the time, I want to suggest to let the machines fold when inactive.

However, the first step would be convincing the rest of the team.
To do that I'll obviously need to have some valid points but I'm not quite sure what I could say to convince them.

This is not one of the easiest things to accomplish, but if anyone could give me some feedback on what to say, or any suggestions that would be great!
It would also be nice to see if some people support this idea.

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to the MPC forum, OptiDash!

Great idea to put clock cycles to use.

I think this is the perfect line to use to close the deal. For openers, you could provide a PDF created by the Pande Group at Stanford for just this purpose. You'll find it here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/FoldingFAQ.pdf

In addition, you will find other links at their FAQ page: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ
The video might help for those that are more receptive to multimedia presentations. The Google news archive link isn't working for me, but there is no shortage of medical paper links at Dr. Pande's blog, found here: http://folding.typepad.com/

I hope that gives you something to work with. Most importantly, be honest about the nature of the install and make sure you have permission, preferably in writing. The project can sell itself to people who already want to further medical causes. But a hospital is still a business and increased electricity is an expense they will have to accept. Let's hope they do.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

Yes - Welcome Optidash,

You could also show them This video created a few years ago by another team. http://icrontic.com/team93/videos/foldflash2.html

And if it has not been mentioned before, you must also have Written permission from the hospital before you install Folding on all those systems.

Good Luck

I wanted to set up my local hospital's computers to fold a few years ago. They liked the idea until I found that they were using either DOS or proprietary OSes and software. Most of their computers were 300MHz Dell Optiplexes with Pentium IIs Hell, even my dentist's office today still uses office software that looks like a BIOS screen...

I work in healthcare. Hospital leaders do not need to be sold on the mission of folding. That is not a problem. They will be focused on THEIR patients, as they also contribute MILLIONS and MILLIONS to those that cannot pay. To all those that believe the media that we do not have universal coverage know crap about hosptals and nothing about the healthcare community. Hospital leaders will be worried about costs and stressing probably older more fragile machines. They cannot tolerate machines going down that are pushed over the edge by folding. Yes, I know the arguments for folding, I do it myself and I have burned out a few thousand dollars worth of equipment.

Bottom line is that they are already giving and are already being highly charitable, so this is an ask that they will weigh with the possibility of taking resources away from the patients who are under their care.

So, having said that, you would be best going for office computers that do not do large databases/finances. Anyone in management should be a target unless they sport a laptop. After they see that is OK, move on to more. Do not expect that machines in the OR, ED, ICU or Radiology would ever welcome anything other than its base task. Most hospitals will be running either XP or 7. Expect lots of XP still. Many will be running dual cores with some quad - remember $$ are short in hospitals. They may be running the hospitals medical record - this is your biggest competitor. If your hospital is still on a paper record, then you have an advantage.