Hi, this sounds like you might want to look at Condor. Condor is an excellent tool for doing just that sort of thing (desktop cycle harvesting). It can be installed on Linux or Windows machines, and it is highly configurable. One can set machines up so that jobs never run when the user is working, so that users don't even know a job is lurking in the background on their machine. This would save you the trouble of having to reboot the machines, and you would get extra cycles during the day when users are in their coffee break etc. Very nice package, free , very mature and great documentation. We run a Condor pool here and we think it is excellent. There is also a large user community already with mailing lists etc and good support otherwise. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/ If you have a pool of users who trust you to run jobs on their machines then this is just the ticket. cheers Micha On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 14:34, Nick D'Angelo wrote: > In speaking to our R and D managers, they posed a good question. > > What about their desktop machines (relatively New Dell PCs), have them > automatically shutdown and reboot, say at 8:00 pm and then join the cluster > until 05:00 am. > > Then at 5:00 am, initiate another reboot that will present the Windows Login > for the 'normal business day'. > > This would make great use of the hundreds of computers that are mostly > sitting idle during the off hours 'normal business day'. > > Thoughts, suggestions always appreciated, thanks. > > Nick > > In case you need to know, I am likely going to install the BioBrew v3.x > which has just been pre-leased in Beta I believe. > _______________________________________________ > Bioclusters maillist - Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org > https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters -- -------------------------------------------------- Dr Micha M Bayer Grid Developer, BRIDGES Project National e-Science Centre, Glasgow Hub 246c Kelvin Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ Scotland, UK Email: michab at dcs.gla.ac.uk Project home page: http://www.brc.dcs.gla.ac.uk/projects/bridges/ Personal Homepage: http://www.brc.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~michab/ Tel.: +44 (0)141 330 2958