Okay so I don't know much about Folding, but seeing KW mention in it in a reply to I'm sorry but I forget's previous raising of it in the ideas ideas ideas thread, I would like to ask a question.

We have an office of about 50 or so workstations - most running middle-top end C2D cpus with 4gb ram. We've laid off a fair number of people lately and a lot go completley unused during the day. And of course, at night pretty much all will be turned off since we don't hibernate because we're quite "green" but then we are also involved in public medical sector.

Now folding is doing the computational number crunching of some type of chemistry / biology no? What kind of effort would be required to farm all this unused computing power into folding? And would it be a worthwhile contribution to the effort? Does anyone else promote this kind of thing, yourselves or anyone you might know or heard of?) I'm thinking I might pitch it to the office in the office meeting tomorrow and see about getting it in our marketing press campaigns.

It would involve installing the client on each PC, signing it up to the same team and user name and giving each PC a unique number - no big deal really, but the trouble will be getting the higher-up's to agree to it. If you are an NHS site (an assumption - "public medical"!) then there are other factors to consider - the resulting increase in power usage with your bills paid out of the public purse etc

Snowy, get them Folding.
I'll send you guides if you want.

If the company has been laying people off, the last thing they will want is increased electricity bills for no return - this is "wasted" electricity for the company, because it isn't generating revenue...

If there is some way they can get free publicity out of it, then they might go for it, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

If they are already leaving the lone PC's on during the day then they are already wasting money...

You've a point Dave, but we've the lights on now and we're about 20 metres up in the air in a warehouse loft office flanked on both sides by huge windows that (at present) have sunshine pouring straight through them; one of our Directors fancies herself as a bit of an eco-warrior but the lights on doesn't seem to bother.

I raised it earlier today in our office meeting - it was recieved well - using the words "our bit for cancer" will always get people thinking - and I have now offically suggested it through our new QMS system (we're going for ISO 9001) - the first to do so in fact.

Oh and the bills are a collated share across our entire building - so we'll only be adding to the grand sum, and paying a fourth of the extra ourselves - and since we're paying for the heating to still be on downstairs (they're obviously just a bunch of wusses) - it'd be trade off. And I have made the suggestion we needn't do overnight folding across all workstations... but I reckon it would look pretty good on our company website/profile given the nature of our work....

if the higher-ups agree to it, then definitely.

...Or make them into an epic Botnet to take down Faux News...

But srs, go for it!

Can't you put them to use doing some number crunching for that then? FaH often appears to be more about willy waving than anything else.

Shush.

Snowy, get them all folding for the Chimp Challenge.