Maximum PC

I've got several more CPU's coming online in the next 4 days and a lab of new dual core horses coming in 2-3 weeks. Anyone got a list of these monkeys? I'll be the Man with the Yellow Bat to your curious George! Monkeys will gurgle tales of this massacre through their breathing tubes when the march is done.

I expect to pass IamDeMan in the next 10 days. It's gonna' take me a while to get up to SM but he's the cherry on my simian cake.

Who else is on the monkey crew? Anyone else want to join my push to put these damn insults to evolution back in their cages?

/All in good fun.

You know how to make a grand entrance DC.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Damn I smell a contest here. You may want to consult with others (points to overclockers) before you fire such a salvo across the bow. The monkey team there is still licking their wounds and wondering where that knockout blow came from. They never even saw it coming. I'd hate to see such a fine young upstart like yourself make a rookie mistake like this.

Otherwise, I'll be your huckleberry. Bring it on.

Oh King... your words of caution are appreciated and taken in mind. But you see - I've read back through a lot of these threads from before my arrival. I see how the monkeys cheated and have devised a plan to limit their abilities.

I'm not going to play the time challenge game. I can't beat a group by myself and a bunch of these monkeys have a good number of horses in their stable.

What I can do is pick them off one by one. I've decided to roll the Folding client out on every workstation in my control. It will take a little time but that's more than 200 systems crunching for me. I'm not bringing a knife to a gun fight... I'm rolling in the howitzer!

Worst case scenario? They spend so much time dealing with my surge that they're unable to conduct any other challenge. For now - I've got an SMS package to go setup.

EDIT - Including KingFish, I see about 86 CPUs I need to counter. Most of the monkeys I know of have additional systems crunching for other teams. Since I know I can double that 86 without a big problem, I'm relatively confident this will be a good fight. I imagine some of these systems are a little older and dedicated to folding. That's cool. All our systems are replaced every three years so they're in pretty good shape techwise.

It's the ones you can't see that you should be worried about.



Are you related to Tanya Harding by chance?



Nice!

Even if I fall - the program wins, right? I need to throw a 'help me' plea out to my coworkers and get them to join my monkey bashing crusade! Those guys in the digital media departments have some serious horsepower.

Absolutely right!

What does the lineup of 200 machines look like?

They are nearly all lab machines.

The lowest specs are:
Dell Optiplex GX270's P4 3.0HT with 2GB RAM

The higher ends are coming in now:
HP xw4300's Dual-core Pentium D's 950 3.4 GHz 4GB DDR2

I've got a shit-ton of Intel based Mac's and a couple dozen of the G5 PowerMacs in labs as well. I noticed Stanford has a Mac client, so that's cool.

I'll be employing our render farm in the down-time as well.
That's 4 load balanced blade servers Dell 1955's with Xeon cores and stacked (edit: almost stacked. 16GB each) with RAM. The farm is only used a couple months of the year. From what I've read you can run a client on each core? That's 16 clients with right there, no?

Nice specs on those machines. You say you have control over all of those? That would definitely be a nice addition to the team. What kind of time frame are you looking at here?

As quickly as I can. I'd like to have everything in place by Christmas. The Fall semester starts next month so preparation for that takes precedence.

Without throwing too much about me into the open, I control a large portion of the technology assets at the college I work for. My realm includes Architecture and Industrial Design. Both disciplines are very heavy on CAD development/analysis. We have design labs all over the place. The render farm supports our Architectural students (Viz/Maya.)

Every one of our students receives a laptop when they enter the school as well. It's a good setup as it limits use of our lab systems to specialized functions and classroom education. All of their laptops are CAD certified, so they prefer to do most of their work out in the studios and not in the labs.

I wouldn't have thrown down such a challenge if I didn't think I could give the monkeys a damn good run for their money! or bananas, as it were.

When you laid down the gauntlet I thought you were referring to your other lab of 15 machines (way different than 200 machines) that you were going to add. I surely wouldn't be able to hold up against 200 machines. At least by legal and ethical means anyway. I'll be keeping a beady eye on ya.

I had to decide if I really wanted to spend the time rolling out (and monitoring) all of those clients. Seems like a good plan to me and minimal overhead once it's all deployed.

I also had to request supervisor approval for such a larger scale deployment. I did and am now authorized to move forward. We weren't going anywhere without a thumbs up. I'm not throwing out 10 years at a great job to fold a few more WU's!

For anyone else in the academic realm - the whole, "hey, this type of project advances our academic mission in a whole new way" approach seemed to work pretty damn good.

EDIT - Let me clarify this now, so we don't have any confusion. My statistics are based on CPUs. I plan to deploy 200 clients (which is why I was comparing monkey CPU count.) On systems running dual cores, it would be 2 clients.

It won't be 200 systems, though Stanford will reflect 200 CPUs (or close to) within the active period. I don't want to be called out in a few months for falling short!

200 systems eh????? Might create some major waves in the banana realm...... haven't had this much hostility towards us in a long time....

Must be some built up frustrations out there.......

LOL it all started when I saw SpiderMonkey, and thinking him cute and cuddly I accidentally hugged the stuffing out of him... Its been war ever since

Serously though - Dented that is an awesome array of machines at your disposal, and I would applaud anything you'd bring on board - not just to keep the monkeys in line - but also to up the Team's points as well as the fact that its that much closer to a cure hehe

Very cool on the college gig, after leaving Microsoft I went to work as a sysadmin at a collge - I loved it - I'm bummed my wife's job pulled us away lol - I really miss all of those machines to play with

We my have to chat in PM about your gig hehe - I love keeping my ear to the ground on that stuff

Tuathal

Any time tuathal! It's funny - I could definitely (note that it is spelled correctly) make some extra $$$ working back in the coporate world but the academic pace keeps things so fresh, and the access to ever improving technologies on regular cycles, is more than enough to keep me happy where I am.

The original plan was only to work here a couple years but that's definitely (note that it is spelled correctly) been stayed by preference. Besides, my boy is 8. A free college education in 10 more years sounds like a damn nice job perk to my ears!

lol isn't that the truth!

I was blown away when I moved from Microsoft to a state college that their hardware was (for the most part) every bit as good as Microsoft, and in many cases - we upgraded more often at the college than we did at MS. lol in the year I was there I actually upgrade over 75 staff's computers at least 3 times...

Over all - my department installed 2500 desktops and 24 servers in that year... Boy was it fun hehehehe

Heck - I miss the free education for me too! lol I'd kill to find a job with another college - it was most fun!
Tuathal

Good to know that you did ask permission

Be careful... The monkeys can be very sneaky...


(You should make a collective I'd definitely join to fight the monkeys cause my collective's recruits vanished)

hbgrg, please just drop the collective thing, okay, People hate having you spam all these posts with your collective information. Most people like having their own name in the stats. i know that by myself, I have gotten into the Top 500 without any outside help. And that was with just 2 computers folding constantly. Yes, you can get a lot of points folding for a collective. However, most people don't like them.

By the way, I have noticed that most people actually LIKE the monkeys. I know that I find all of their posts entertaining. That is the number 1 reason you have not gotten very many results for you collective.

In other news, congratulations Dented, this is a monumental achievement. You never know. If this keeps up, you may end up as the next 1920x1080p How???. And that is a name that is very respected in these parts, even if he is folding for another team.

Long live How???....even though he is no more