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Storage@Home - Beta

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For those that don't know what this is (taken from Wikipedia)
Researchers are dealing with massive amounts of data, far more data than in the past. For example, the data generated by hundreds of thousands of active processors in Folding@home program, increases by more than one terabyte per month. The usual methods of using RAID to store data and using data tapes to send data to other research centers do not scale well into the terabyte range, due to the lack of money at research institutes. Taking cues from their work on Folding@home, Adam Beberg and Vijay Pande began work on Storage@home, to allow volunteers to donate storage space instead of processor power. The idea is to break down a big data file (for example 100MB) into a few smaller files (for example 10MB) and store these smaller files on different computers around the world through the internet. With proper overlap between the smaller files and using redundancy to correct for possibly lost data files, the original file can be correctly recovered or the amount of loss can be minimized.
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And here's the short paper published by the Pande group regarding Storage@Home. (.pdf file)
 
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I think I'll give this a shot later. Resource requirements seem to be practically nothing so it shouldn't bother F@H.
 
Oh please, they can't afford a decent SAN system? 1 TB is practically nothing in a month. Not worth my time.

No points being rewarded either, no incentives for me so far.
 
Jon855 said:
Oh please, they can't afford a decent SAN system? 1 TB is practically nothing in a month. Not worth my time.

No points being rewarded either, no incentives for me so far.
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Umm, no they really can't. University level research funding is usually quite sparse even with government grants, especially in medical research. If you read the paper, it says that:

even with the aggressive discarding and compression of generated, it [Folding@home] has resulting in 150 terabytes (TB) of generated data. This is growing at over 2 TB per month and all of this data needs backup
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They also mention that they're trying to scale this project to a petabyte, and that "maintaining a centralized online petabyte would cost well over 1 million dollars for hardware alone, require twelve racks of disks, a large server room, and result in a large monthly electrical bill".

FWIW, it seems like a very logical idea. Set away 10 GB for data archival for F@H, but they would need to make the points scheme VERY competitive as hard drive space is not the only resource being used, but also bandwidth. And for some of us, that is quite the precious commodity.
 
on mobile so I cant really read the link, but is there a points system in the works for this? I dont want to clog my pipes so to speak for nothing, already got enough $$ into folding for my internet to slow to a crawl as well
 
Jon855 said:
Oh please, they can't afford a decent SAN system? 1 TB is practically nothing in a month. Not worth my time.
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QFT

Stanford is a private university, and they get plenty of money.
Last time I checked they had like 15 billion dollar endowment fund.

Maybe the money is not going to the F@H program....i dunno but it just seems that its more of they dont want to pay for a SAN rather than cant afford a SAN.

All that said, I have extra space so i will prob do it.
 
why not spend the money on a storage operation and put it into researchers? If you increase your crunching ability by 10 fold, you can reduce your storage needs by ten fold, youll increase your odds of finding a cure ten fold, and once you make a breakout success youll increase your popularity and funding by WAY MORE than 10 fold, and you can start all over, with the whole program just becoming better and better as time goes on

why not??
 
nitrobass24 said:
QFT

Stanford is a private university, and they get plenty of money.
Last time I checked they had like 15 billion dollar endowment fund.

Maybe the money is not going to the F@H program....i dunno but it just seems that its more of they dont want to pay for a SAN rather than cant afford a SAN.

All that said, I have extra space so i will prob do it.
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OK, now everyone repeat after me: Pande Labs != Stanford University. :D

Even for Stanford, the cost of building such an array is not trivial, let alone the cost of electricity to run and cool things (they are in California remember). I'm going to assume that they don't have a building big enough to house this just sitting around ready for them to move it in to as well. You can't just assume that the F@H project has millions of dollars just sitting around with nothing else to do with them.
 
You know I would be down with this however I don't have the geek chops to get it done. Mock me if you will, but I still can't seem to get port forwarding done correctly on my DSL modem/Router for the Linux Distros I torrent.
 
In thinking about this over the last few days......

Will there be a throttle for up/down speed in the client? I have no problem giving up some bandwidth, but out here in middle of nowhere Ohio, we don't have the fastest connections.
 
One Peta byte is about 1024 TB, right?

A 2TB drive is about 200USD.

102,400 for the drives.


512 drives running at about 10W each, so 5.12 kiloWatts.

About 64 NAS devices (at 200USD each)to have all of that, so assuming 40W additional for all the NAS equipment, 2560W, of 2.56kW. (12800 USD)
About 32 Network routers/switches, at 40W each, and at 100USD each, so 1280W, 1.28kW, and 3200 USD.

Students... getting paid?

102400,
12800
+ 3200
------------
118,400

double it for wierd costs (cables, student interns installing it).

triple it for inefficiency, electrical bill.

Quadruple it for redudcancy.

5x (quintuple?) is for rent

6x (sextuple?) is for corruption.

So about 710,400USD, a horrible guesstimate, but I will accept it as possible cost.

Make it 1Mil to cover taxes, shipping, research, and opening ceremony.
 
jeremy, I'm never coming to you for advice if I have X dollars what do I build with it

:(
 
jeremyshaw said:
One Peta byte is about 1024 TB, right?

A 2TB drive is about 200USD.

102,400 for the drives.


512 drives running at about 10W each, so 5.12 kiloWatts.

About 64 NAS devices (at 200USD each)to have all of that, so assuming 40W additional for all the NAS equipment, 2560W, of 2.56kW. (12800 USD)
About 32 Network routers/switches, at 40W each, and at 100USD each, so 1280W, 1.28kW, and 3200 USD.

Students... getting paid?

102400,
12800
+ 3200
------------
118,400

double it for wierd costs (cables, student interns installing it).

triple it for inefficiency, electrical bill.

Quadruple it for redudcancy.

5x (quintuple?) is for rent

6x (sextuple?) is for corruption.

So about 710,400USD, a horrible guesstimate, but I will accept it as possible cost.

Make it 1Mil to cover taxes, shipping, research, and opening ceremony.
Click to expand...

Do realize though that there is a difference between consumer and enterprise hard-drives and other products. What might be a $200 consumer drive could cost $600 for the same storage in a more reliable enterprise disk. Of course, maybe Stanford doesn't need the enterprise hardware, but I'd bet that is what is keeping them from building it.
 
EvilAlchemist said:
The points are worthless to begin with .. so why even do F@H then ???
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Ding ding ding...

Personally never thought that point recognition was a very valid reason for participating... but that's just me.

If it helps the project, and the cause, how can this be a bad thing?
 
well, I dont mind clogging up my network (the CPU's and GPU's are already, why not the network lol) if its for some points. Internet speed is important to me, because even with my rigs all folding I still have good connection and reliable browsing and other web based activities

(ya, mindless sheep here, but I just can't get enough of those shiny points!!)

Hey, atleast I'm doing something!!
 
Storage@Home will be credited independently from F@H and the specific system is TBD based on what I read on the forum. So don't get too excited about points.

And for the people saying "why don't they just buy a storage farm with all their money", you could say the same thing about F@H itself. Why don't they just buy a server farm and have that do all the folding so we don't have to? Distributed computing has the potential to be much more powerful and much more cost-effective than an in-house computing setup, and I doubt that Pande Lab has anywhere near the resources required to do anything like this on their own. So contribute if you like, but you have no right to criticize without knowing all the facts.
 
Zero82z said:
So contribute if you like, but you have no right to criticize without knowing all the facts.
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Criticizing without knowing all the facts is what makes life so interesting!

;)
 
I'm in I have about 5 TB available and a 5mb/s pipe, I've had flawless internet over the past year and never see slow downs so a small bit more of traffic can't possibly slow me down! Not when all the pron manages to not throttle my network! :p
 
Sunin said:
I'm in I have about 5 TB available and a 5mb/s pipe, I've had flawless internet over the past year and never see slow downs so a small bit more of traffic can't possibly slow me down! Not when all the pron manages to not throttle my network! :p
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That's a heck of a lot of storage! Do you do a lot of video processing?
 
didnt you miss what he said? its all for pron
 
Interesting. I can see both sides of the arguement but I lean towards the sceptics - imo as part of a wealthy university they should be able to find the money to build a datacentre to run the thing properly, or they should be making a fuss about it and looking to get some sort of grant.
Having said that, in principle I wouldn't mind participating, but i'll wait until they have a mature client and it seems to be running smoothly.
 
So if they enable points will Western Digital provide more PPD than Seagate? Will Toshiba get the scrap units that don't store as well on the other hard drives? Can you get more "D" by running multiple vm's on a single hard drive?

/ducks :D
 
I have this image in my head from back in the 'ol Celeron 300A days. My friend in the quest for more HDD space was plugging in every drive he could get his hands on. He had the mobo populated (4 drives), he had a IDE add in card (2 more drives) and the crowning jewel of it all was a Sound card that also had an IDE controller on it (for another 2 drives) He had drives Velcro-ed to the inside case panel. (no I'm not joking, he used Velcro)
 
I bet he would have won your giveaway!
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