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The Cost of Distributed Client Computing?
ialbert asks: "I only recently decided to install SETI@home on my mostly idle home computer. It got me thinking though, are those free processor cycles truly free? Has anyone had experience with processors dying prematurely due to a constant, heavy load, or is usage pretty inconsequential? What about other components, like harddrives? And how much does a 100% processor load increase your power bill versus a 1-2% idle load over the course of a year? It's easy to think of idle computers as an untapped computational resource, but what are the costs to the computer owners?"
I imagine that processors die mainly though being powered on and off repeatedly, than being fully used. Same for hard drives I expect.
I don't imagine it's possible to "wear out" a processor by using it. Course I could be wrong...
what are the costs to the computer owners?
$4.23
Next question?
what are the costs to the computer owners?
The costs will be trivial upon the arrival of our new SETI-detected alien overlords.
While it is an interesting question, the reason you donate cycles to seti/columb rulers/cancer research/whatever is you love science and the progress of humanity.
:)
Its not about money.
Or to put it another way. How much CPU cycles are wasted on Pr0n, and how does this help society?
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
In the computer lab at my school, I am about to replace some P5's with brand new machines and those lowly P5's have been running Setiathome constantly for at least four years without a hiccup.
The only way a CPU would die from being "overused" is if it didn't have sufficient cooling or if it was a bad chip in the first place.
I used to run a protien folding application on a spare Athlon I had. I thought it would help advance humanity. Then I discovered that the deamon I was running was spining my hard drive up and down all the time. Eventually the bearing gave out, and the disk platter came flying out of the case at high speed. It sliced through my cat and embedded itself in the oposite wall. The computer itself then caught fire when the drive motor over heated. It burnt my entire house and all of the contents, including a twelve thousand page thesis I had been working on (That work is classified, so I can't tell you what it was about). I stubbed my toe escaping, and a fire fighter died trying to put the fire out.
Just don't bother is my advice.
Just let it run, ya cheap bastard.
The power of Christ compiles you!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Excludes wierdo laptop setups
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
People don't buy a Cray or Origin cluster to have the CPUs sitting at 1% load, they're made to work. If a home PC was properly cooled I'd hope that it should last to whatever the lifetime is spec'd at by the manufacturer.
Trolling is a art,
Since there aren't any moving parts inside the processor, processor load is unlikely to wear it out. It is more likely that a processor will fail due to issues with cooling and from being turned on and off frequently. So keep that Seti@Home going!
I've noticed a significant difference in my electric bill if I don't use the suspend function in my computer. I don't have the bills in front of me but maybe $10 a month. I'm using one of the early, high-power consuming P-IIs though.
somebody worked this out when i started the e2 distributed.net team.
the figures
I ran SETI on my laptop for about a year, until the hard disk died. I mainly contribute this to the heat it produced. A year's worth of 150 F temperatures couldn't have been good!
At least not from doing what it's supposed to be doing. They died from excessive heat, or shorts, but never from doing their job...
Hard drives can't be that stressed by the sort of work the SETI program adds. Not exactly a daily thrashing.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I've found that on my laptop, the cost of running seti@home cuts my battery life in half, so when I care about power I am sure to leave it off, however, when ever it's plugged in, it like the rest of my boxes are chugging away. When it comes to power costs I don't really care currently as I don't pay my electricity, it's included with my rent and believe you me I make good use of that.
As for premature death of CPU, being under heavy load should not hurt it, powering on and off often does far more 'wear and tear'.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
A CPU under constant high load will on average die younger. The heat puts a lot of stress on the material. But all in all, looking at the way CPUs are upgraded, it is more likely you have a new computer before your CPU dies of finding aliens.
But I wanted to praise the choice of article. I myself have been wondering the same thing. I know that it may not seem like a lot of extra usage, but the hidden costs may be substantial.
Or my Tin Foil hat is on too tightly.
http://use.perl.org
I installed the SETI@Home client on my GFs laptop in order to up my work packet totals. I then started it and saw that everything was peachy and the CPU was chugging away at 100%. I then closed the case and went to bed. In the morning the keyboard was partially melted, the CDRW no longer worked, and the fans were dead. Maybe the fans were about to go anyway, and maybe the CPU load caused them to run constantly thus causing a failure.... we may never know.
True story.
-m
http://www.modus-ponens.com/blog/blog.php
#
# Modus Ponens
#
Since I figured the cost of the processor running at 100% was insignificant compared to the cost of the hard drive constantly spinning instead of spinning down during downtime, I created a small RAM drive on my various computers where I ran seti@home so that the file access wouldn't affect hard drive usage. This worked equally well on linux and windoze. The only other thing to do was to create startup and shutdown scripts to create the ram drive, copy the files over, and start the process and then to copy off the files before shutdown.
Why do I h8 apple?
God doesn't live here either, idiot.
The power consummed by a fully loaded processor is pretty inconsequently compared to just leaving the computer on all day vs turning off overnight. I used to always turn my system off I wasn't going to use it for another hour or so. I have all my computers running 24 hours a day now however.
And no, I've never had a processor burn up from this. Don't imagine I will anytime either.
I intentionally bought my house so that I had a street light in my front yard. I had my power turned off once I moved in. I then opened up the plate on the bottom of the street light and tapped into the wires. I then ran the wire to my breaker box and buried the wire. I haven't had an electrical bill in months. Better yet, my SETI clients cost me nothing. Thank you taxpayers!
When Folding@Home is turned off, my power consumption for the entire system is 140W. When I activate Folding@Home, the Wattmeter reading jumps to about 190-195W.
So if you're concerned about electricity usage in your house, then yes, distributed computing sucks more power.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
I used to think this was a great idea. Until I started overclocking my box, and building my own systems.
If I run at 100% processor utilization, my case heats way up, causing my room to be noticably hotter, plus the fans are always running...and with the higher case temperatures come higher failure rates in everything...
If you could have it use..say 40% of the processor, I would be all game...
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
I have noticed by running SETI@Home, that any extra processing causes my windows box to crash just that much sooner :)
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
As for HDDs, I would think that they last longer if they're not spinning, although I have no proof of this. This is an important reason why I don't leave them spinning. And the displays, no question about it that it being on, screen saver or no, decreases its life. A given vacuum tube has a certain number of hours of life in it. If it's on, the numbers left go down. That's why I don't use a screen saver but instead have the monitor shut itself off.
It'll definately cost you in electricity to power the processor that would otherwise be in sleep mode. It will also increase your cooling bills. (On the plus side, during the winter, your heat bills will be less ;)
How much it will affect these depends on too many variables (which processor, OCed or not, cooling method (air, water, peltier, etc.), and the cost of your energy).
Someone should do an experiment with a few different PCs in different simulated environments comparing sleep, idle, and 100% load states.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Fridges are cheaper to run when they are full...
Keeping them full reduces the air volume and therefore the amount of cold air that escapes the fridge when you open the door.
I think the question is how much EXTRA, be it in juice or hardware wear, does this cost? Unfortunately, it's one of those extremely difficult to measure items, much like many business cases and "what-if" situations...
Since most of a processors energy is disipated as heat, I would imagine little difference in load for a "resting" processor as opposed to a "working" one. But what is the value of the work performed as compared to the extra energy required to perform it? Physical work is easy to measure. How do you measure computational work in comparison to the electricity required to do it?
Just wanted to congratulate you on your outstanding writing abilities.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
where "freedom of speech" means race-hate groups like KKK
You're a fucking idiot. That's exactly what freedom of speech means. FREEDOM TO EXPRESS YOUR VIEWS.
Perhaps we can send you back to Stalin's Soviet Russia, there you wouldn't have to worry about morons in white sheets and as a bonus you wouldn't have to deal with that annoying Freedom of Speech thing.
Actually a refrigerator runs more efficiently if it is full.
Have you thought for yourself today?
CPUs are extremely hardy. The reason why I wouldn't run Seti is because it gives your hard drive some serious punishment. There is no way it is worth our while running Seti when it is going to help burn your hdd out.
Chips can "wear out". There are physical effects that make molecules move when there is an electric current in a conductor. My understanding is that this is a known problem and the traces are made thick enough so that it will be many years before they start to fail.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The costs will be a lot higher if we don't detect and defeat the alien hordes through SETI.
I hate penny-pinching accountant types.
Pretty inconsequential if you ask me...
I've been running SETI@Home on multiple computers since it first debuted, and have had no problems at all. The temperature difference on my processors usually at most a few degrees, and the power draw, as measured by my UPS, changes by only about 2 watts as compared to sitting mostly idle (on P2/P3 era machines, anyway). That's about half of one of those small night-lights, in terms of power consumption.
[I have a rackmount 1500VA APC UPS, max load is about 960 watts. With two servers connected, I see the load change from about 18.8% down to about 16.9% after killing SETI on one machine, hence roughly 2 watts each]
I have not lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere!
Honestly, at ~700W for a typical 19" monitor, your monitor is probably the highest powered device in your computer. CPU power draw varies from about 10W or less when idle, to 70W or so for a rigorous instruction mix (the Intel Itanium is somewhat anomalous at about 100W when fully exercised). So remembering to turn off you monitor, or at least selecting the low-power mode of your monitor for a screen saver rather than animating useless objects will probably have the largest effect on your power bills.
--
BitTorrent in C -- LibBT
http://www.sf.net/projects/libbt
Your post made me wonder too. I have come to the conclusion that you have to much idle time on your hands to be worrying about things like this.
Please plant a garden or sweep your sidewalk. LOL
Actually... Refrigerators experience lower load if they are well-stocked because the food items in the fridge hold their temperature longer than the air, and thus help keep the temperature more stable, reducing the need for the compressors to fire up.
All generalizations are bad.
OTOH, consider other (possibly more immediately) beneficial programs that use distributed computing. Cancer and Alzheimer's genetic research, for example, can be found through Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer. You donate your cycles, pay some extra for your electric bill, and let them have some computing power that they may not be able to afford directly.
I've been using http://www.distributed.net/ on and off for a few years now and i've never had a problem with any of my processors. However I usually upgrade my cpu/mb every 3-4 years, so if you have or keep your systems longer i'd imagine any burnouts would be due to "just an old cpu" and not from the constant use. Then again I don't plan or expect my hardware to last forever.
As far as the power bill goes. I currently have a desktop, laptop, wireless router/hub and zaurus going the majority of the day - at least the systems are always on since I am too lazy to turn them off and have no need too. I also live with my girlfriend who runs the haridryer every morning and must have every light on in the house to check her makeup with. At the end of the month we get our power bill of $45-50 - which in my opinion is not a lot. We're also in California for the record.
Ave Molech Setting
You will throw out your CPU for being such a slow and out-of-date piece of junk long before it burns out.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Interestingly enough, refrigerators are more efficient when they're full. They need something inside, or they'll short cycle frequently.
(Compressor starts, runs to get air temp down x degrees, and stops. Air temp rises quickly (in relation to things that are normally stored in a fridge) so it cycles again...)
Off topic, yet amusing.
As far as I can imagine, having the processor under full load all the time wouldn't be too damaging so long as you kept it cooled properly. Heat is the number one source of trouble for me when it comes to maintaining a stable system.
As for the cost over the course of a year, it would depend on a few factors, namely the particular specifications of your unique system. If you took two identical computers, except you put in diffeent CPU's, and ran both straight for one year in 2 different locations, you would probably see a slight contrast of the electric bills over a one year period. If what you are worried about is "wearing out" your hardware, just make sure you keep it nice and cool inside (30-45C core temp preferable).
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
For a single (typical) PC, the difference in electrical usage will be a few dollars per year. Given the typical cost of electricity in the U.S., you're only talking somewhere in the $20 - $100 range.
You're more likely to see it negatively affect your sanity; having those fans running at full output all the time.
If you're using Windows, all your spare CPU cycles are already being used. Open up the task manager and look for a process called "System Idle Process". Notice the CPU usage. Using SETI@home (or folding@home) is a much more productive use of those CPU cycle, so compute away!
Wasteful
Wrong. Back in the halcyon days of RC5-56 and the DES Challenges, computers didn't make a distinction between idling and crunching, so it was a great idea to use those spare cycles for something (remotely) productive. But this is no longer true: modern-day power-sucking CPUs do have circuitry that lets them idle and cool off when the processor is just running NOPs. Thus, keeping a number cruncher running 24 hours a day will stress your processor, requiring full ventilation and running up your power bill.
To illustrate, a standard Pentium III, without the requisite array of cooling fans, sucks down around 30W when running at full speed. Run that sucker for 24 hours, and you've run up a bill of 0.72 kilowatt-hours, or about 3.6 assuming 5/kW/H.
http://use.perl.org
I'm kinda in a position to answer at least one part of this question.
CPu's, when idle, can use as little as 2-5W. When fully utilized, up to 40-50W (depending on the make/model/etc). So let's assume you have a middle of the road processor that has a difference of 25W between active and idle. (This is consistant with measurements on a PIII 800MHz, a little lower than middle of the road.)
Now, 25W * 24Hrs * 365 days * 1kw/1000W * $0.10/kWhr = $21/year. Roughly $1/year per Watt of additional power.
As far as breaking of components, as well as the system is cooled properly, I wouldn't think it would be a problem.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
It probably causes more wear and tear to the fridge if you put more food in it instead of keeping it empty
Actually, there's a nice medium point at which it uses the least amount of energy. The mass in the fridge acts like thermal inertia, so when stand there with the door open trying to figure out what to eat, the 'fridge doesn't have to work as hard to restore the temperature setpoint afterwards.
That said, this is why it's a good idea to keep gallon jugs of water in a storage freezer. There's an ititial energy cost to freeze the water, but it lowers your average cost over the long haul.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
If you want enjoy freedom, you also have to be responsible. Break a law (=a social rule enforced by the majority of the society) and we'll take away your freedom. Abuse your freedom of speech and we'll take away your freedom of speech. No freedom is absolute and irrevocable. Why don't you try to see a little bit beyond your dogma?
BOO! TERRO
Assume that you rarely use your fridge to store food for long periods of time. Most of the time, you stick something in, and then take it out a few seconds later.
Then, someone comes along and asks to use the excess capacity. So, instead of your fridge being at or near empty, it is always full. Also assume that replacing a fridge is something you do not want to have to do until you need more fridge capacity, in order to store better and bigger amounts of food.
Now, if the Seti@Fridge food caused your fridge to use significantly more electricity (or in my case, caused weird problems which made you have to reboot your fridge), you would be annoyed, right?
Actually, having food/drink inside your refrigerator makes it cost less to run. It's easier to keep water cool than air.
Are belong to Microslop Craporation:
"but what are the costs to the
computer owners?"
Royalties due Microslop on their patent for sharing idle CPU cycles.
Thanks and have a nice day,
George W. Bush
Ok, I'm being retentive here, but a densely packed fridge operates more efficently than a sparsely packed one, especially if opened frequently. That's because the room temperature air that rushes inside when opened represents a smaller fraction of the total volume when it is full, and the objects inside will be able to absorb the small thermal difference more easily.
My fridge from the univeristy, on the other hand, would have basically no cold remaining when I stared inside at the emptyness that lay before me, and would have to try to cool the air, 1/16 of a gallon of spoiled milk and a tupperware container of ramen noodles.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Only cost is the electricity, and if you're that concerned about your power bill, just replace a few bulbs with compact florescents. While you're at it, get the natural light output bulbs and you can fight winter depression at the same time...
If your computer otherwise dies, odds are it's a defect that would have killed it anyway.
It probably causes more wear and tear to the fridge if you put more food in it instead of keeping it empty, but the prime purpose is to store food.
A fridge will perform better and last longer if it is kept full. When a fridge is full of air, the cold air excapes easily when the door is opened, and new air must be cooled, causing wear. If it is kept full, a much smaller air turnover occurs and less cooling is required. The same logic applies to air leaking out of the fridge, but most fridges these days seal pretty well...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I keep expecting Alan Funt to pop up on this one.
There are no gears in a CPU, so physical wear and tear is not possible. I guess if you consider wearing out the little electrons...
And since a processor is constantly working at full speed, what difference does it make if it is sitting idle, or running some application. When your CPU is doing nothing, it sits around churning out no ops.
I kind of enjoyed responding to this, good chuckle factor.
I run the distributed.net client on all the machines I have running. One which has got to be 6 or 7 years old, and dnetc has been running the whole time. That machine is rarely shutdown - and it's still goin strong.
;)
I've got a couple other machines, 1 and 2 years old running some hot AMD processors, the 1st runs around 40-45 degrees C, the other 50-55. They also seem to run fine.
I don't think it'll wear your hardware down unless you've got a really poor cooling solution. As far as hard drives go, the dnet client probably makes the least hard drive access of any app on my system. Not sure about seti, but I don't imagine it crunches the HD either.
As for electricity, I have no idea, but where I'm from we pay the lowest rates in Ontario I think. So whatever
-kidlinux.
The cost outweighs the coolness factor of telling chicks you are looking for proof of ETs.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
I wish I could say the same about my brain. Every time it seems I get a sample with a high Gaussian, the men in the black helicopters come over to my house, erase my data units and inject me with the happy juice that takes me to that special place. I don't think I can take any more.
Errr... If you are that worried about a few cents in electric bills, perhaps you should never turn your PC on? Think of the HUMONGOUS cost savings there! ;)
Check this website for a breakdown of the energy costs.
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/2404
The last time I measured my PCs' power consumption, there was about a 10-15 watt difference between sitting in idle state and actively crunching on something (seti@home, folding@home, etc.) That's assuming the OS is smart enough to issue HALT instructions when idle. Win98 in its busy-loop (w/o Rain or Waterfall installed) will draw the "full load" wattage no matter what.
This was measured at the AC line input, using a "Kill-a-Watt" metet, for several Pentium III, AMD K6, and Via C3 machines. Consumption would rise from ~45 watts at idle to 55-60 under load. Multiprocessor boxes probably show this delta for each CPU, although I haven't had the chance to measure one.
Assuming a 12-watt difference and 24/7 operation, this amounts to 8.64 kilowatt-hours per month... not very significant, unless you're off-grid running on solar panels or somesuch.
Average US energy cost is around 8 cents/kW-hour, so that adds up to USD $0.70 per month.
which would be about USD $0.70 at the nat
t will be many years before they start to fail.
Heat can be a major factor in the process of "wearing out". I have seen a practically fried K6 chips(bac at the time), from a machines which only use was 24/7 jukeboxes. Also this summer the local server at the place I work (which was a decent config with 2ghz Celeron CPU) died during a 30 heat wave and againt it was the CPU overheating.
While one may argue for the first case heat was a known problem and in the second the cooling wasn't enough(although, I may assure you IT WAS), when a CPU is constantly wroking even @ 35%, it does wears out much faster than while being idle or off.....
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
This is a very interesting analogy. I understand what you are saying, but at least for a freezer, the opposite is true. A freezer is more efficient when full. Essentially it has a large "cold" sink inside of it. The interesting question is whether or not this applies to a fridge where items are inserted and removed and the door is open much more often. Does the large cold sink in the fridge overcome the work needed to be done to cool new items? I dunno. Sounds like a possible IgNobel prize topic to me... :)
A lot of distributed clients aren't that well behaved. An idle process can still slow a system down immensely, unless it completely shuts itself off when there's activity. I haven't tried seti@home, but I messed with some of the des & rc5 cracking clients long ago.
My apc backups rs reports how much power is being used. When im at 100% cpu vs ~0% its an extra 17 watts.
For a 19" monitor + p3 + hard drives etc, its only about 220W total from the ups. (im sure much more peak from a cold start).
It's about 50-70 watts on the latest 3GHz PCs. An idling 3GHz Pentium 4 takes about 20 watts and a fully loaded one about 70-90 watts. At 15 cents the kilowatt-hour (that's what NYC pays), that comes out to an extra 21.6 cents/day or $79 per year compared to leaving the computer idle all year long.
So, yes, power is a substantial cost consideration. NYC power is also primarily gernerated with coal, so every joule of electricity used is that much more CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, if the CPU cycles are going to a good cause, $79 is a quite affordable donation.
Depending on your geographic location and seasonal climate, if it is hot outside, you may be wasting a great deal of energy if you are running an air conditioner to pump the excess heat outside. OTOH, if it is cold outside, and you would be heating the room with electricity anyway, you aren't making any difference to your electricity usage.
that's a bad analogy. A better analogy would be if your neighbour distributed and stored all of their food throughout all of the spare space in the fridges and freezers everybody else in the street owns.
All of sudden you care because you are paying the power bills for storing your neighbour's food (and drinks).
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
No we won't.
-- taking over the world, we are.
"...but the prime purpose is to store food." You mean they're *not* just for beer anymore ?
8 IDENTICAL replies in less than four minutes.
And about what? A Goddamned FRIDGE? Are you people THAT eager to show off your useless knowledge?
Fridges are like airconditioners -- you want to size them correctly, or they become less efficient. [as it's better to run constantly, than to start/stop the motor and compressor repeatedly.... sort of like a hard drive]
As two people have already pointed out, there's air space in fridges, and every time you open the door, that air falls out, and is replaced with room-temp air. [normally near 70F, as opposed to the 40F needed to keep food out of the infamous 'danger zone'.]
After the recent hurricane, a spokesperson from Giant Foods stated that food in a 1/2 full freezer will stay good for 24 hours without power.... a full freezer will keep for 48 hours. And that most fridges/freezers take some time to get down to temperature, so not to stock them until the power's been back on for 24 hours.
Anyway, my suggestion to you if you have a mostly empty fridge -- fill it. It doesn't have to be with food. A few jugs of water will help you in the long run, as water has a relatively high specific heat. [I think alcohol is higher though, so there's a legitimate reason for keeping a fridge full of beer]
Also, 'A' 'B' 'C' doesn't mean crap to us humans...you want to keep your fridge near 38F for most food stuffs. Buy a fridge thermometer...it's cheaper than a trip to the emergency room.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Electrons are constantly moving through the system and that produces wear over time. It is just that they are so small that the you can neglect the damage they produce for a very long time. Newer computer systems would tend to have better power management if the components are design for those things. You can definitely save some money by not running Seti@Home, not using your computer, and not posting to slashdot. You could also use solar panels to generate your electricity for your computer and you would then not worry if it is on for a long time. A flashdrive instead of a platterdrive would help prolong non-volatile data life and stability. Also, If you use Seti on a cheap linux cluster to start instead of the office computer then with this combination of things you may save money and do more Seti@Home.
Please comment over my assumptions about people's ability and enthusiam about constructing and wanting to use these things.
abstraction is 2 keep the weak from knowing the truth. show your source code && always seek the knowledge within
That is an excellent advice.
I am a seasoned hard-core survivalist and I can tell you that when the shit hits (it will hit soon) the fan, clean water is worth its weight in gold.
If you keep gallons of water frozen in your fridge, it will not go bad (you can add just a tiny amount of chlorine to make it absolutely sure). Even better, when the electricity is cut off, the frozen jugs will not only yield use clean water but they will help you to keep the fridge cold and your fresh food from going bad. If you can live a week on your fresh food and only then move to your MRIs and dried food, you've got a definite advantage over your starving neighbours.
In the winter, you want to heat your apartment. Any heat coming from your computer is less energy you need to use in your heaters. It's 100% "efficient" -- remember that thermodynamic efficiency is measured in terms of how much energy is wasted as heat. But in this case (and what a special case it is!) the very goal is the production of heat! If you have electric heaters, the costs precisely balance out and you essentially can run your computer for "free."
My dual Athlon XP 2400 system (yeah, with the modification to run in dual) produces a ton of heat. Just a few months ago I was unable to run it at full load for more than a few minutes before the overheat alarm went off (I have no AC in my apartment). This doesn't just make my room noticeably warmer; it makes the whole apartment warm. We still haven't run our heaters a single time, and it keeps getting colder outside.
Wherever there is an area you must warm up, the effective cost of running a heat-producing piece of equipment is zero. Think about it.
All those extra resources being consumed, all that extra carbon being released to the atmosphere. Of course you've got to weigh the benefits to society against the environmental cost, or buy renewable energy.
> ... I installed the SETI@Home client on my GFs laptop ... In the morning the keyboard was partially melted, the CDRW no longer worked, and the fans were dead.
>
So are you sending this from the doghouse?
lots of people are saying they've been running seti@home for years now 24/7.
found anything?
not trolling, just asking.
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
Okay, just out of wondering, which do you think takes more transistor firings: A NOP? Or a DIV? Or a coprocessor FDIV?
Aside from that, I seem to remember something about computers having variable clock speeds. Maybe that's not the case on PCs, or maybe it is -- I dunno.
But increased heat output could be a concern for a processor overdriven on its CPU speed, I'd think.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Not if your machine is a notebook with a mobile processor, like the AMD Athlon XP-M. They reduce their clock speed when idle, so the lower the load the lower the power consumption.
Also, processors do not generate nearly as much heat cycling NOPs compared to pulsing electrons throughout the entire chip when performing actual logic. The heat is what does the damage.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
For anyone not seeing the humor:
How does 8 years of VB programming qualify AC as an expert on server systems?
Apparently other Unixes are not serious either (only Windows 98/NT/2K apparently)
Apache is developed by weekend hackers
Keep them coming! :)
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
So let's make it illegal to hate anyone! Except of course whomever the government wants us to hate at the moment.
No one said that it's an irrevocable freedom, but to say, as the original parent implied, that our freedom of speech is flawed because it allows the KKK to have rallies is just plain stupid.
Break a law (=a social rule enforced by the majority of the society)
How exactly do they enforce this social rule?
The costs of running seti one or two computers computers may not be that great, but what about the combined costs of all seti users?
What about the environmental impact of generating all that electricity?
I wouldn't say running seti like prorgams is really free.
should be the main source of your electrical draw. The PS should draw the same amount of power no matter what the rest of the system is doing. If your CPU is idle, it is just using less of the power from the PS, not from your household supply. Just think about it, would a dual or quad system cause a circuit breaker to trip if it suddenly went from 0% to 100%? No.
-Jimi
because what hunting rifle has a bayonet lug
I think you're grasping at straws here. Yeah, I suppose a processor's life would be shortened by constant use, but it's JOB is to be able to compute. I'd be more worried about propper cooling inside the case and specifically on the chip, and not running the chip above specifications.
If you're that worried about it, you may as well be running the OS with the LEAST processor usage. If you run windows, that probably means running windows 95 or 3.1. Is it that important? I don't think you'd get much more life out of a processor by doing this.
By the time the processor dies from overwork, you could replace it for a few dollars. Pentium and P2 chips are $20. You can get a new Duron chip for $40. I have some Pentium's and P2's that used to run linux and Distributed net non-stop. They are still working. They are just not in use because I have faster equipment.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The power costs are negligible on a single machine. Run a farm and it can get expensive when you factor in cooling, which is the primary expense. Air conditioning running 24/7 or close to it in a house is far more costly than the consumption of a typical PC.
The advantage of the heavy CPU usage clients like GIMPs is the fact they are often the first things to detect an impending CPU failure. My GIMPs client running on an Athlon wound up saving the machine. I brought it up to see its progress and it was reporting hardware register mismatches. Turns out the heat sink fan had failed and the CPU was overheating. Fortunately, there was enough supplemental cooling in the case to keep the chip from frying outright but Windows was chugging along fine without any indication of a problem while GIMPs was saying "turn me off or die".
These programs exercise the CPUs to limits that few programs ever use. They make wonderful test and benchmark applications. When Cray tested their supercomputer CPUs, they used to do prime number calculations since any error in the floating point hardware would come out instantly.
Most modern OS'es use HLT commands to power down inactive parts of the CPU. On such an OS, running a distributed worker like seti, folding, or dnet will make the chip run a little hotter, and probably draw an extra watt or two out of the power supply (depending on the chip and speed). On older OS'es it doesn't make a difference since the chip never really "idles" so to speak.
I'd say go for it. All processors die, but not all processors really live! ;)
Some relevant links:
dnet
folding@home - For this one, if you're on Windows, use the cmdline version. I've found the Windows version to be a little nasty and ALT+TAB you out of games that run full screen.
Seti@home
There's a thousand more, but those are the big ones. Have fun!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
My last home system was build to be quiet. As such, it has low-speed fans which 'tuned' to keep things cool under normal use. I ran the UD 'protein folding' distributed app at first, but noticed a 10-degree C bump in CPU temperature when it ran vs. normal use without it running. So the trade off for me was noise - the fans had to run faster when the distributed app was running, making the system noticibly louder.
- Michael
If you are running SETI@home, your processor cycles are going on a fruitless task anyway...
Are you trying to write this off your taxes? :)
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Nothing is truly free.
- Danny
I know this anecdotaly from the fact that with my dual Athlon system, when I start a process that pegs both CPUs to 100% from idle, the system fans actually slow down enough that it's quite a noticible difference in the sound. I'm not kidding. I've actually had times where my first hint that some process has gone into an infinite loop is just by peripherally noting the sound. The other night [yes, I was up at 4:00 am], my redhat distro's cron.daily was running rpmv, and I only noticed this because I was reading a web page at the time, noticed the fans slow down... and proceeded to run top to see what was going on. Anyone else have similar experiences?
And yes, maybe I should upgrade my power supply, but it's already a 600W. It's probably because I have 9 drives. Goodness... hope they aren't slowing down too in some detrimental fashion, although I doubt it would hurt them to spin somewhat less quickly.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
In the winter, that extra wattage generated by the CPU load will contribute to heating your home. One would hope that your heating system is more efficient than your computer at heating, but you never know.
Conversely, during the summer if you have air conditioning, you'll have to take into account the extra work that your A/C unit has to do to counteract the heating generated by your computer.
Part of the cost, even if small, is that this provides a potential door for worms. You need to be able to justify this risk, or mitigate it.
I can only speak for my country. Here people vote for the members of the parliament (MPs), the MPs propose and approve laws after which the executive/judicial branches take over the task of overseeing the enforcement of these laws. The enforcement is conducted by the police and, if necessary, military (only if approved by the parliament).
What's wrong with that? The fact that the social rules (laws) are made and enforced by the government and not by people directly?
If the majority of the people think that we should not allow people to incite violence against the people of certain colour or religion, so be it.
BOO! TERRO
Before we can evaluate the cost of SETI@home we need to ask ourselves an important question regarding its purpose: Have they found and fucking aliens yet?
Get revenge: Unsolicited Commando
thank you troll, drive through!
This is not informative, only DOS executes NOPs on idle times, any 32-bit OS executes the HLT instruction, wich putz the processor in a low-power consumption state, while waits for the next interrupt call.
The it-doesn't-cost-any-effort attitude behind distributed computing projects like seti@home is wrong in principle.
Not only does it cost a small but undeterminable amount of money because of a computer being used and an electricity bill that has to be paid.
You also spent some time on installing the program and probably even more on following the results.
It's all about engagement.
You decide to install the client because you are intriged by the concept of SETI or for whatever other reason you might have. If you consider the extra CPU cycles a liability for your system or your personal financial position than probably your engagement isn't what it's supposed to be.
Yes, it costs something extra in electricity with modern processors. There are two ways to approach this for people who think the extra couple of bucks isn't worth the science:
1. Turn off the outside light you leave on 24 hours a day instead and you'll still end up with a 15 watt savings.
2. Set the computer to sleep, hibernate or shut down when you haven't used it for a while. While boring the processor to death surfing the web the machine will consuming it's normal amount of power anyway (for the most part). You might as well use the extra clock cycles for science.
3. Take the 420 cans of Coke and Dr. Pepper under your couch to the bottle dept to cover the extra cost of electricity.
Back when the ppro-200 was a neat machine, but out of most budgets I calculated that the costs in electrisity alone to run enough 386s to do as many RC5-56 blocks in a year as a single PPRO would be more than the cost of a new PPRO machine. (Note that soon aftwards the PII came out, at the time no CPU could touch the PPRO for blocks done, though other CPUs were better on a per clock calculation)
So if you have an old machine that you keep solely for the addition to your stats in some project, you may be better off getting togather with a bunch of people and each contributing your yearly power bill for the one mcahine to getting a new machine.
Seriously though, it can be surprising how much different devices draw. My old 19" monitor at work pulled about 100 watts when a "typical" desktop is up (3-4 watts when in power-save mode.) My newer 17" LCD (nearly the same viewable) pulls about 15 watts with the same desktop and 1-2 in idle mode.
I'm a PC tech for a living. I have observed that:
1)Factory-built desktop boxes never have problems out of the box unless defective running these apps. They've already run burn-in tests and verified adequate thermal management.
2)You get to do your own QC on your homebrew box. As long as you tuck the cables out of the airflow path and stick with recommended equipment combinations and configurations all will be well. P3 and later Intel processors have thermal limiting built in--it'll save the hardware, but will give the symptom of crappy performance. No guarantee on chipset, though.
3)The biggest concern with hardware lifespan when using one of these distributed computing apps is that the machine cares much more about dust bunnines.
Yes, dust bunnies. They plug up the interstices in between the processor heat sink fins and the case ventillation holes. I just de-fuzzed an HP VL420 (P4 1.7 GHz) this week. Dropped the CPU die temp by 10 degrees C while running folding@home.
Newer machines have thermal fan speed control built in. If the machine seems noisier than it used to when doing the same things (fans running faster), it's probably time for the vacuum cleaner or the air can.
4) Hard drives hate heat. There's a reason they're supposed to be mounted in the coolest part of the case. MTBF for the drives assumes spin time and a certain temperature (typically 50 C), so if the app keeps the drives spinning more, they *will* die sooner. And if they're hot, they'll die sooner, which leads me to:
5) Laptops frequently have long-term problems with these apps. Thermal management for gaming is OK, but continuous 100% processor use results in conduction heating of components that may not be adequately cooled (like the hard drive bay on Sony GR and GRX laptops).
So yes, leaving the lid up may make a real difference. So may propping the machine up on its feet so that air can flow beneath.
Pay attention to the machine for the first week or so, and then you can probably ignore it for about a year...
... I might eat their seti@Fridge thinking that it was just leftovers that were up for grabs.
I actually checked the power usage at my appartment. Literally unplugged everything (devices on standby use juice, too). Checked the meter to make sure it wasn't moving.
Turned my computer on... 150 Watts/hour.
Turned DC program on (Distributed Folding). Uses 100% CPU and goes heavy on the RAM. Results... 165 Watts/hour.
That means 15 Watts/hour more. Hmm.
15 * 24 * 30 = 10.8 kWh. Which where I live costs... $1!
Yup, if I'm leaving my computer on, I'm paying for those cycles at a cost of $1/Month.
So yes... it costs. But if your leaving your computer on anyways, it makes sense.
And when they finally find the cure for cancer, they'll suck your significant other DRY selling the drug to him/her. That's what concerns me. I want to know if the knowledge obtained by using free computing power will be free, too. Or at least affordable.
This is probably redundant, but most CPU's have a HALT instruction which causes the CPU to, well, HALT and use minimal power. The CPU sleeps until an interrupt wakes it back up. Operating systems rely on this to reduce power usage when there is nothing to process.
I've never been much of a hardware person until recently getting an intership doing PC maintaince at a fairly large company. But I used to run the dnetc client on my DP 1.25Ghz G4 using BOTH processors. For a while it ran just fine and I used the computer normally with no problems. But after about week my computer would randomly shutdown/restart/logout and a lot of applications began to lag. I stopped running the client for a while and everything appeared to go back to normal. Now I run it using 1 processor and it has been that way for about 3 months with no problems whatsoever. I haven't been experiencing any new problems or drastic slow-downs since before I ran the client at all, so I'm under the assumption that it didn't cause any long-term damage. But I can say fairly surely that it caused some pretty bad problems when I had it using both procs.
Where I work the IS folks have installed Surveyor on most PC on the network (it's a voluntary program). This little app quitely monitors computer energy consumption and writes the results back to a database.
If you are concerned about energy consumption this can be a powerful tool to manage energy costs.
"The old forget, the young don't know" --Japanese Proverb
Using your example to answer one of the questions of the poster:
Electricy where I live costs $0.08 per KiloWatt/hour.
Your extra 50 watts is (50/1000*24) 1.2 KW/h per day, times 31 days is 37.2KW/h per longest month, times $0.08 (for me) is $2.98 per month. Plug in your electric rate for your cost.
If you have to move the extra heat produced, your costs will go down in the winter and up in the summer.
actually, a full refrigerator is more efficient than an empty one.
consumer energy center
My computers spend all their free cycles computing lexicodes, or generating new hash functions, or testing new random number generators. It's always RAM-resident, so the hard disks stay idle. I did have to modify my Windows settings so that the processor wouldn't shut down after 20 minutes of no mouse clicks.
Now, I live in a studio apartment, which means (I think) my rates are adjusted differently than are those for family dwellings. I also never use electric heaters, don't really switch on the lights during the day, etc. So yeah, my electric bill is always pretty low.
Still, it seemed to me that running a server out of my house was going to cost me something like $6-10 a month. For that price, it seemed like I may as well go out and get shared hosting somewhere, and spare myself the constant hum of the fan...
Breakfast served all day!
No matter how you look at the cost of power, a 20% increase is a 20% increase. I argue that is not "minimal" no matter how you look at it.
The truth is that cpus are only rated for a certain number of caculations. The exact number varies among processors but its really high.
So yes running number crunching will use more of those calculations and will wear your cpu out quicker.
Get a computer that doesn't suck so much juice. Like a G3-based Mac or Unix box. Or any Mac. A 1 Ghz G4 will top out at 10-15 W *total*, maxed at 100% CPU usage. A 1 GHz G3 uses 8 W running at 100%.
It may not seems signifigant, but after our PC-using roomate moved out, and a new Mac-using one came in, our power bill was halved. Literally. Which seems kind of screwed up- I should've been charging him more!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I actually had such an argument about this with some friends (one of them an EE professor at a local university) that I ponied up $20 for an answer on Ask Google.
The debate was about whether or not the running computer under my desk was just as efficient a heater as the baseboard one across the room that's on anyway as it's October here (there too, I bet). In this part of the world, electricity is the cheapest form of energy available.
It turns out that the answer is that except for the (very low percentage of) emissions that are in the microwave range, which go through the walls, everything else is converted to heat anyway.
So I now leave all my computers on all winter, and my central furnace gets to run less as a result.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
You computer could suffer the same faith...
how long until
Ask these guy. Some of them are quite crazy, running "DC farm" and whatnot.
:wq
T3 anyone? Do it and the machines will rise!
EJ
Where in the USA is electricity so cheap? Your bill may include a "generation cost" or a "price to compare" around that number, but if you divide KWH used by the balance due on the bill, you'll usually get a much higher figure. My bill usually works out to around US$0.12 / KWH.
Using the 30W figure for a PIII, running a distributed-computing app on my Pentium III for a year would cost me 24 x 365 x 30W / 1000W/KW x US$0.12 / KWH = US$32. That won't break me, but it's hardly free. What's more, that only holds if I would leave the PC on 24/7 regardless of the distributed app; I don't, so the 30W could easily be more like 120W, for an annual cost of more like US$120. And of course, it just gets worse with more power-hungry CPUs. I'd say the electric consumption is a valid concern.
... at linux gazette from this month (issue #95) about using an oscilloscope to view signas generated by some programs and how the multitasking operating system (linux in that case) behave when it has to process several things at the same time..
- The shareware version of Linux?? Would that be the one you install for thirty days before it starts nagging you to send a 10$ check to Linus?
- Kernel-level programming in VB? Even in Windows there is no such thing.
- Any stats for VB running as fast as C? Even Microsoft would never dare claim that!
- I'd sure love to know how to use GCC 3.1 to improve the speed of binaries created in VB... Pointers anyone?
- No journaled file-systems on Linux? When was that comment posted, 1992? What happened to ext3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS,
...? And no SMP???
- Linux/FSF - now that's the funniest one.
:) Wouldn't that be GNU/Linux?
- Microsoft "shared source" giving the same freedoms as the GPL?!?!
Thanks troll, that was fun.So, in summary:
- It will cost about $10 to $25 a year extra, depending on your energy costs and CPU model.
- I would argue that things like your screensaver settings (and whether your monitor powers down) have just as much of an effect on the energy bill as the CPU. This assumes you use a CRT, as it probably doesn't matter much for a LCD.
- Depending on your climate, it may not matter one bit as that electricity is converted to heat anyway. If you're using electricity to heat your home then it's probably a wash.
- Any premature failures will most likely be due to cheap or inadequate cooling, such as fan bearings losing lubrication and failing, or too much accumulated dust. In other words, it's probably a good idea to fix those deficiencies anyway... If distributed computing brings them to your attention then it could even be a beneficial thing.
Conclusion:
Run distributed computing if you think it's worthwhile, but don't lose too much sleep over it breaking things or costing you a lot of money.
Imagine the power wasted by macroing in online RPGs.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I used to participate in RC5-64 project project. Over the 4 year period of participation, I personally involved about 80 PCs at work into it (with my boss's permission). The only negative side of that was the fact of CPU coolers needed to be cleaned quite regularly (which is really nasty job to do, really).
The cost is miniscule compared to my overall energy costs for the year.
As for wear and tear: I have CPUs that have been running more or less constantly since the 1980s that are still chugging away. I have never lost a CPU in 21 years of owning computers.
I don't think its a big deal.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Excellent advice, however do not reuse empty milk jugs to keep the water in. The milk residue will eventually funk up the water.
You insensitive clod.
(seriously, though, my apartment only has electric heat, which really sucks here in California, thank you Gray Davis)
that I went through, where I wanted to help people. I participated in RC5-64 for over a year. My power supply fan died and I didn't notice it for some time, possibly 2 weeks or more. When I replaced the fan and booted up, the power supply and video card died immediately. I continued with RC5-64, but lost motivation after a while.
Companies and universities have budgets that include extra "hot-spare" equipment and staff. They can better absorb the costs of extra wear and tear. I hope they help these distributed computing projects out.
There was a bright side, however. I wanted to do other things (surfing, e-mail, etc.) while running distributed.net, so I decided to try Linux. It had better multitasking than Windows, very noticeable on my slow K5-166. I've been happy with Linux ever since (dual-booting w/Win98).
I experienced this cost firsthand.
For fun, or altruism, or whatever, I began running Folding@home last year. I ran it for roughly a month, before I chose to stop. I ran it on 2 machines full time, both of which had less efficient, high MHz CPUs.
My electricity use rocketed from my previous month (which was high) of 3600 KWh to 5200 KWh. Weather temperature was essentially unchanged during that period. I could find no other explanation for the huge increase other than Folding...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
How to have a reliable, easy to use computer that will never fail in hardware or software:
Don't use it.
WTF? Things are made to be used! So what if your CPU lasts 100 years instead of 200! It'll be out of date between shipping and receiving, and you'll replace it within a year or so (or 3-4 years or whatever). Besides, premature failure is a great excuse to buy a new one (newer, faster, cheaper).
Same with cars. Use them.
I bought an ammeter just to look into these kinds of numbers, and what I found surprised me. Though I haven't done the same on pentium style machines to see if similar numbers bear out.
My desktop machine consumes on the order of 50 watts idle, and I leave it on all the time. I have an external drive and several internal, and some networking stuff, but still that's pretty hefty for an idle machine.
Then I put load on both the processors running them at max for a little while. That ate an additional 10 watts. So it consumed 20% more electricity to do number crunching than my computer being idle.
My monitor consumes another 60 watts, so it's considerably more efficient to run rc5 than it is for me to stare at a jpeg. And I have 2 processors. My understanding is that x86 processors consume about twice the juice per clock cycle, and run at higher clock frequencies, so PC guys probably have a steeper curve, but still, an idle desktop machine is not exactly a power miser. My G4 laptop numbers are very different and much lower, but the display can still easily account for half of the energy drain under normal usage. I wouldn't fold protein on my laptop.
I've never had a PPC chip fail due to age. Either they came bad, or they lived beyond all of the other components.
You can go to sears and pick up an ammeter and a line splitter for about $60 if you wish to stop flinging conjecture and actually learn something. Even cheaper stuff can be found online, all accurate to within 10%
-theed
Or maybe they'll wipe us all out, in which case it won't matter.
Why do we waste CPU cycles on moronic spellings like pr0n and l33t and pwn?
It's old, everyone does it so it's not cool anymore. It's time to move on people.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I have used seti@home since 2000 on the same 3 computers. Two of them have had HD replacements which probably were due at least in part by cache activity from the seti@home program, but three years is also close to what I put as a HD life cycle. No procs were killed in the writing of this post.
The situation changes quite a bit if you can't afford the treatment. The cure is right there, yet you can't get it because you're not rich enough. Sadly this is the case for most people suffering from currently non-curable diseases and illnesses (AIDS, cancer, etc).
You should post some detailed instructions for doing that. I would love to do the same, but don't really have the inclination to figure it all out on my own. Granted, that's lazy me asking you to be not lazy, but I think there's probably a lot of people out there who don't have a clue where to even begin something like that.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
I have not observed any hardware failures due to me running SETI (been using it since 1999). Granted, it is not running on my iBook, but that is to save battery life. My desktop machine at work has been running it 24-7 for almost 1.5 years now, and the machine (AMD Athlon 1.33GHz) runs great. At home, the cost of running multiple computers 24-7, some of which have SETI going, was roughly $20 per month. But this does include a file server, 4 laptops charging on occasion, a desktop machine, and a window insert air conditioner (during the middle of this past summer). I would say 1/2 of that is the AC.
$60 per year for the electricity. Average of nearly $0 for hardware.
Has anyone had experience with processors dying prematurely due to a constant, heavy load, or is usage pretty inconsequential? What about other components, like harddrives? And how much does a 100% processor load increase your power bill versus a 1-2% idle load over the course of a year?
Those are all surprisingly complex and computationally intensive questions. In order to find the answer, I'll soon be releasing "@home@home", a distributed application designed to calculate the true cost of itself.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
>> How much CPU cycles are wasted on Pr0n,
>> and how does this help society?
Good question.
And BTW, how does the BSOD help society?
My most idle box is my Linux server, which mostly just tosses traffic to and fro, and occassionally sends me some mail and files.
But, it also is a fast AMD system. So, during the winter, I tend to put some sort of distributed program on there to help heat up the room. =) It puts out some heat too. Who'd think a thing as tiny as your pinky-nail could heat offset my gas bill?
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
I have Seti@home running on two boxen at work (1 Mac, 1PC) and 5 in my basement at home (4 PC, 1 Mac). They've quietly chugged away for the last year and I've never had a problem with any of the parts or any serious increase with my power bills. In fact with the removal of a 15-year old fridge, my power bill went down.
Granted, I've also spent time keeping the basement clean of dust and dirt, changing my furnace and A/C filters once a month instead of once every three months and keeping the windows closed. One of the side benefits is I don't have to dust the house as often and I find that my allergies don't give me as much trouble as they usually do.
As someone else pointed out, install a distributed computing program if you want to. Don't worry about the lifespan of the parts. If anything fails, it was the part and not the program that caused the failure.
If you're worried about the cost for parts and power, then maybe you shouldn't be using your computer at all then.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
As a hardware design engineer, some facts are: The lifetime of a uP is based on the temperature of the silicon chip and hot spots on the chip. ---- Keeping the package cool with a good fan/heatsink so the temperature rise of the chip is only a few degrees will keep the chip alive for longer than you want to count. ----Power Cycling and its thermal cycling effect also reduces life, but you can expect the power switch to wear out long before the processor has a failure. You can also expect the power supply itself to have thermal shock failures long before the processor or other ICs. Remember, the low-voltage-reset (an internal circuit) keeps the processor from running during power up or down cycles so the effect is almost purely due to sudden heating and cooling as mentioned in the previous post.
.I had thought that if I put my lights on a dimmer, it would consume less energy than a normal on/off switch.
However, after doing some research on a hot dimmer switch I had in the kitchen, I read that a dimmer just dissapates the power and doesn't save you anything in electricty consumption.
A little offtopic, but food for thought.
Live web cams
Lol. At first I hated this guy because he was such a troll. But now when I read his posts I laugh. This guy posts the *exact* same text to zdnet talkback too. It's quite creative and would fool many normal users into thinking that it had a shred of credibility. Oh yea, if I remember correctly, this guy is regestered as Marvin Marvinski on zdnet. He claims to have a consulting company under the same name.
Even when your computer is 'idle' it's still doing something most of the time, (er... power saving modes excepted...)
that this is completely crazy.
Guess you were pretty pissed when y2k didn't go down. People jump all over tinfoil hat guys, but no reproach of this: "when the shit hits (it will hit soon) the fan".
To stop flaming and add something, wouldn't it be a better overall solution to invest in a generator and stockpile some fuel? I know it's more expensive, but maybe you could stop taking crazy pills for 1 or two months and afford it.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
I pay about $.30 per kWh (Italy). All thermal, cept what we buy from Swiss & French companies that run the nuke stations we do not want to have here.
.09kW x 8768h = 789kWh =~ $236
Headless, my Piii/866 burns about 90W at full blast, 70 on idle. I keep all HDs spinning all the time when the PC is on.
Without DC running, I keep the machine off about half the time, so my delta is
* $10 a month for the full-off hours
* another $2/mo. for the load delta
That's about $ 140-150 / yr.
I gave up on DC but not before considering setting up a farm at a friend's factory in Switzerland, 1h drive from here.
Too much trouble, and I am not that good at remote maintenance.
While I won't bore everyone with the differences between MTBF, FIT rate and what those numbers actually mean in an integrated circuit, let me assure you that 40 years is NOT the lifetime of a CPU. A CPU is NOT an ASIC and it never will be treated like one.
Design rules and electrical checks are supposed to give a level of assurance that there won't be reliability problems down the road but they are not perfect. Every chip has a flaw that will render it inoperable at some point; worst-case, a PN junction will start looking like a resistor and that will be it for that chip. That is WAY down the road though, so likely another flaw will be a chip's downfall.
Random flaws are the most common. Some of these cause very early failure (known as "infant mortality" failures, unfortunately) but some take much longer to cause devices to fail. Not just he metal lines, although that is one mechanism; void migration, defects in the thin oxide of the transistors, contamination... the list is long. And each wafer lot coming out of the fab may have a different set of defects; newer technologies like 0.13u and 0.09u (aka 90nm) are not yielding well due to the process not being fully worked out. The chips that do make it out are likely not as good as the ones that will come later as a result.
Now I'm not saying that current CPUs are going to start popping like popcorn due to heavy usage; just that there is going to be a wide distribution of the time that they fail. A 30+ watt CPU running full-tilt on a setiathome application is just not going to last 40 years (ignoring the usual issues of other components of the system dying before then). High junction temperatures have just a huge impace upon chip lifetimes and CPUs have the highest junction temps. They are not rated for 40 years at 100% activity -- don't you think there's a reason for a one to three year warranty?
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
This makes perfect sense, and should be, to anyone in the world, "self evident". Calling it dogma doesn't make it any less an "inalienable right".
Then, someone comes along and asks to use the excess capacity. So, instead of your fridge being at or near empty, it is always full. Also assume that replacing a fridge is something you do not want to have to do until you need more fridge capacity, in order to store better and bigger amounts of food.
Your analogy breaks down here. A full fridge is cheaper to run than an empty fridge, as there is less heat loss when you open the fridge.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The moddep-up posts don't talk about the heat generated by the distributed clients that make your CPU run at 100% for hours, what is adressed on this post.
BTW, I bought a Portege 3440 with a broken screen for peanuts and turned it into my home file/print server. Sure, a larger hard drive is more expensive, but the power usage is extremely low, and with the rates we pay, we can't afford to have a massive tower serving files. We only need 20-30GB of common space, so it works great and has a built-in 2 hour UPS!
I don't run them because I am not expert enough to know what they really are doing. For all I know, it is processing cycle to help keep the Bush Family Evil Empire in power. Really.. How do you know you aren't helping out the NSA process phone calls? Or Atomic bast simulations or something like that? I don't know, so I don't run them.
Now I'll put my tinfoil hat back on before "they" make me say other crazy things.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Many have pointed out that chips essentially don't wear out, but that's only in a world where every motherboard has a perfect design. In reality, given any motherboard, there will be some bad parts of the design and the lifetime may indeed be effected by how much it is stressed, especially those with an error in the design as regards to heat dissapation though underspeced drivers can be a big issue to. Also, many use capacitors whose values change after a few years due to chemicals cooking out of them. This is why many of the cheaper motherboards on the market will just stop working or become unreliable after about 3 years. If those motherboards are run hotter for a larger percentage of time, certainly there will be a reduction in life.
Even so, the cost amortized over time is still minor. If a motherboard goes bad after 2 years instead of 3, then you've "spent" 1/3 of the lifetime of a $100 or so component on the task. So, maybe about 34ish bucks split over 2 years or 17ish bucks a year. Not free, but not much money either.
Here is Rain 2.0. It's an oldie, but still does the job. Again, this is not needed if you are using Windows 2000 or higher, because those use the HLT commands automatically.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
--
sorry someone had to say it
Not exactly. You can still say the latter, it's just when you actually DO the killing that it becomes illegal.
The laws against slander and libel puzzle me though, as they seem orphaned by the first amendment. Seems like they set a pretty good precedent for 'selective free speech' as in the 'Do-Not-Call List.' I do like the exceptions they make in libel rules for public figures. People who live by the sword must at least be able to die by it.
I have always liked the line "Your rights, inalienable as they may be, end where the next man's nose begins."
Speak for yourself.
Except if you live here where it is warm almost year round. Then you can't balance the excess heat vs excess cold. :-(
...take alot of them here) but a 5 year old Sony P!!! 550 is still chugging along with the original hardware.
As far as killing HDDs and CPUs, don't worry about it unless your system is marginal to start with. I have had no failures due to running S@H for the past 4+ years on some of my computers. Lightning strikes and such are a different story ( UPSs, surge strips,
Power use is a different story as you will have to cool and run them. 4 of my units on a Belkin 1000va UPS draw 425 watts per hour according to my KILL A WATT unit. Those 4 are PSU, HDD, CPU, RAM, and motherboard only. No monitor, keyboard, floppy, mouse, or extra fans. S@H runs 24/7 and uses a LAN connection to connect to another computer running SetiQueue to get their WUs like the rest of my computers.
I run seti@home, my motherboard died too, I haven't bothered to test the cpu to make sure that it was the motherboard (it's too out of date anyway), and I'm a bit pissed off it died, but computer stuff nowadays is not built to last, even expensive gigabyte motherboards, so I just replaced it with a cheap all-in-one amd cpu motherboard and continue to run seti@home (anyway the new board is faster than the old one). I think that running seti@home is more important, and if the quality of expensive motherboards is that bad (assuming the motherboard), I will just buy the really cheap slightlly out of date computer hardware and continue on. Of coures, it would be nice to buy a really good system to run games on etc...but that will have to wait....just hope the cheap motherboard doesn't burp too much running seti..
An interesting post, and me with no mod points ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
one a 333MHz pushed to 500, and a 633 pushed to 950 (both Celerons). Both of these ran for a long time at elevated voltages (but NOT at max), but eventually the math coprocessor section bit the dust doing Seti. (they ran at average temperatures). If you overclock AND use higher voltages to do so, you MAY have a failure down the road. No more Seti for me. (and yes, that 950, and the 3.0 software could crank some units.)
My point was that some equipment is used for a very long time. Not everything gets junked after 5-10 years. What happens in 30-40 years if everything with a chip in it self- destructs? What's worse, many of the systems that are likely to have very old chips are embedded in the most vital parts of the nation's infrastructure.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I am running the Oxford University Cancer Research program on Grid.org
I am currently running 14 Machines, the oldest have been running about 30 months. Many of these machines have two hard drives and one is my Companies file server. These machines run 24/7.
So far there have been no hardware failures of any type. Since Dell estimates that mean time to replacement runs 2.8 years, this tends to indicate that the hardware is holding up fairly well.
My best estimate is that a Athlon 1.2G box running 24/7 draws about 9 Dollars in power each month. The cost of running the machine 24/7 in north Dallas would be a little over $100 a year.
That is my best guess.
Tom
As others have already said, your CPU certainly isn't at any additional risk by running these apps.
The biggest "wear and tear" item on a PC, overall, is powering it on and off frequently. Just like light-bulbs that always seem to burn out when they're first turned on, hard drives in computers tend to be the same way.
Your monitor *will* wear as it's powered on and used, but there's no good reason to leave it on all the time when Seti@home or another similar app is running.
Considering the average power consumption of a PC, you can easily compensate fully for what it costs to leave it on by replacing 2 or 3 of your standard lightbulbs in the house with the flourescent screw-in "energy saver" replacements. (These don't work well in fully enclosed fixtures because the heat build-up tends to fry the components inside their bases - but they're great anyplace else.) I swapped out 4 standard 60 watt bulbs in my unfinished basement with them, and cut my energy usage from 240 watts to 56 watts total when all the lights are on.
wow - a whopping $25 dollar deduction!!!
that'll save you - oh - maybe $0.15(max) on your taxes in the end, regardless of income bracket. you're far better off with the standard deductions(if you make undre $50k or so - less chance of an audit, even with a palty $4000 in itemized deductions. audits are $$$ to deal with unless you are confident in your accounting abilities and have a high tolerance for stress.
Did this last week to determin my computer power use:
/dev: 165W
21 inch Sony G500; runing win2k at 1280x960 32bit: 98W
19 inch Sony G400; running KDE at 1280x960 16bit: 92W
19 inch Sony G400; no X, terminal mode: 73W
19 inch Sony G400; no X, mc in terminal mode: 75W
external USB 80GB Maxtor 7200RPM HD; idle:10W in-use: 10W
UPS - APC Pro 500; idle: 26W
UPS - APC CS 350; idle: 7W
Dell Dimension T800r:
800Mhz P3
512Mb RAM
GeForce 2 GTS 32M RAM
60Gb 5400 HD
20Gb 5400 HD
CDR
100Mb zip drive
floppy drive
PCI Sound card
Dell system as above + UPS - APC Pro 500; idle: 87W
Dell system as above + 20 inch Sony G500; idle: 183W
Dell system as above + external USB 80GB Maxtor 7200RPM HD; idle: 200W
Dell system as above; copying files from USB HD to Primary Master: 213W
Dell system as above; running folding@home: 208W
Dell system as above; Sisoft Sandra cpu benchmark: 212W
Duron system:
800Mhz Duron
128Mb RAM
20Gb 5400 HD
120Gb 7200 HD
250Mb zip drive
DVD
CDR
PCI
USB 2 PCI card
PCI Sound card
floppy drive
Duron system as above; idle with win98: 86W
Duron system as above; Sisoft Sandra cpu benchmark 96W
Duron system as above; idle with KDE: 81W
Duron system as above; idle no X, terminal mode: 81W
Duron system as above; no X, terminal mode, running tar with bzip2: 80-88W
Duron system as above + UPS - APC CS 350 + 19 inch Sony G400; no X, terminal mode, running ls
Duron system as above + UPS - APC CS 350 + 19 inch Sony G400; running KDE, idle: 185W
other equipment:
20 TV, VCR, PS2 all in idle state: 10W
PS2 on: 30W
PS2 playing a 3D game: 30-45W
20 TV on: 63W
VCR + TV on: 68W
I realize some of these are nits being picked, but so is $.80 on my elec. bill each month.
Given the inefficiencies of the internal combustion engines in our cars and the gross lack of mass transit (in the U.S.,) I think this is one of the lesser energy concerns.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
I used this on my laptop/server, and overheated it, and crashed it, and corrupted my HDD, and had to reinstall the operating system.
Karma: Good, or bust!
A similar case: if you leave your phone charger plugged in to the wall when your phone is not charging, you're still using electricity. You can tell because the charger stays warm (resistance in the transformer coils).
-m
a net loss, since I still haven't found any fucking aliens.
The former will get people annoyed with you. The latter are grounds for arrest, as it is a clear and present danger.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
The basis of seti@home, distributed.net and other such worthy (non-commercial) projects is that of community spirit, distributetd philanthropy if you will. We are donating our hardware (and associated running costs) to the project. Of course its not free, all but the most foolish of us would realise that up front.
As for processors dying etc. Assuming your system is assembled well and has adequate cooling, a good power supply and "clean" power source, running 24/7 should yield lifespans for ICs that are longer than systems which are powered up and down regularly (start-up power surges have a far greater influence on MTBFs than do running hours in an ideal environment). Sure, HDDs failure is directly related to actual OPERATING hours, but I think there is a negligible increase in hard drive usage for such programs since any system with a reasonable level or RAM can hold work units entirely in core.
It seems to me the poser of this question is either a massive tight-arse or has missed the basic point of a donation to a cause one deems worthy. Since all of my boxen at home run 24/7 anyway; just run the processes at a conservative nice level and they wont interfere with the other operations of the box (and if you run windows without "nice", I am lead to believe you can set process priorities in the NT windows releases such as 2000 and XP), as for the cost, if you cant afford the increased power bills then stop donating the CPU time (I would be surprised if you managed to burn an additional kW/hr per week from a single processor and ram running unattended, try using power management to bring down your graphics device and hdd and turn off your monitor).
Finally, anyone who actually believes their system died an early death due to distributed computing programs needs to take a close look at how they (or the monkey they purchased the hardware from) assembled the machines, how well they designed the air flow through the case and the quality of their PSU. I would also check they dont have dirty power locally (for example, here in south OZ our power supply is dirtier than a 4yo in a mud pit, I get potential as low as 214 V at my house and it struggles to peak at the 240V we should be getting and there are many nasty surges throughout the day) if they do, buy a UPS to act as an inline power filter; works a treat.
err!
riprjak.
My computer has a 250 watt power supply. The power supply will always draw 250 watts regardless of the load I place on it, whatever I don't use goes to ground. To run my computer 24/7 for a year it costs me ~$50 US/Year[(24 hr/day)*(365 days/year)*(0.02111 dollars/Kilowatt Hour)*(0.250 Kilowatts)=$46.23 per year US Dollars].
Hardrives and other components with mechanical parts are of course subject to wear and tear from moving parts. So system, CPU, and power supply fans need monitoring and occasional replacement (I got spares). Solid state components tend to fail due to voltage spikes and other untoward events, get yourself a good line filtering UPS.
Nothing is truly free, you are paying for electricity and depreciation of your system. The good news is that systen hardware is so reliable that by far your main cost is power. The hardware will likely last well past the point when your system is more valuable as raw materials than as a computer.
How and where did you hook up the ammeter? I've pondered how one might go about doing this, and I couldn't think of a way that I knew was safe.
It seems widely known that the HLT instruction, supported on many modern (and some non-modern) CPUs, allows for significant reduction in CPU temperature by shutting down most of the chip's subsystems for a period of time. This is true, but also misleading when talking specifically about potential CPU failure caused by heat-induced electromigration. Although halting a chip powers down MOST of its functions, there will still be one or more localized hotspots (e.g., timers or clock-related portions) that HLTing the chip will not affect, and will still be prone to electromigration. Wherever there is a transistor switching state, heat will be generated.
Remember however, that for any average chip operating within its temperature specs, it will take years and years and years (I think I read someone above quoting a minimum 40 years) for electromigration to cause any noticeable harm to the chip...
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Basically, the CPU will run hotter, because it's actually in use all the time. That isn't normally a problem, but if your fan died, or if you've overclocked, or if you're system is in a very hot room, it's possible it could be.
You can expect your electric bill to be a little higher - but it's an extra 5-$10 a month, I believe, compared to turning the computer off when you aren't using it. Turning a system off and on again is probably harder on the equipment than running something like GIMPS.
SETI@home has a few things I don't like. The primary one is that they don't have enough data to analyze, so they give the same data to a bunch of different people. And after they've analyzed that and ask for more, they end up analyzing data that's already been checked. Double-checking (or even triple-checking) isn't a bad idea, but checking the same data thousands of times is pointless.
SETI also runs as a screensaver, which means it's still not using all available processor time. GIMPS runs at a very low priority, but it's always there, unless you shut it down or define times when it shouldn't run. I like the idea that my computer is using all of it's available CPU power, all the time.
There are some other interesting sounding distributed computing projects out there. Try visiting http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-proje cts.html for links to pretty much any distributed computing project available. I've considered getting out of GIMPS in order to join with one of the others, such as cancer research, but so far, I'm just continuing with what I've done for so long.
I haven't had any components die (that I can remember) since I started running SETI@home. It's certainly conceivable that it makes an impact on my electric bill, though.
-Rich
No, your power supply will draw however much power your components need (plus a few % as it isn't 100% efficient) up to a maximum of 250 watts. Typically the load will be about 50 to 100 watts.
Free electricity really is great. I had free water a few years back, and we set up a small waterwheel in the tub to generate power, which was not free. We must have saved almost $5 per month in electricity!
>Seems like they set a pretty good precedent for
>'selective free speech' as in the 'Do-Not-Call List.'
Not quite the same thing there... the Do-Not-Call list addresses a particular type of action.
You have the right to say whatever you want, express whatever idea you like. You do not have
the right to force someone else to listen to it, or force a medium to broadcast your views.
The Do-Not-Call list addresses the latter. Just because I have a phone does not make it ok for
someone to invade my personal space repeatedly, harassingly, to tout off the selling points of
whatever product they want to sell, in the same way that I do not have a right to just barge
in your front door, unannounced, uninvited, to sit on your couch next to you throwing a sales
pitch at you.
I feel the same way about my email box. When I don't want to be subjected to advertising, I
shut off the TV and stay in the house. I shouldn't also have to disconnect my phone or close
my email box also. Those are services I myself pay for. Nobody else has the right to decide
how I use those services.
Every week I (used to) get no less than 20 telemarketing calls on two phone lines (no
exaggeration), most wanting me to switch my long distance carrier or local phone provider.
Compare that with the 3 or 4 genuine calls I get. I'm ready to go back to having my lines
set up outgoing calls only and use a beeper. This is outrageous.
Every week I get no less than 100 spam emails on one address (which has tripled that number
recently), most are duplicates of what I was spammed before, none with identical addys, even
the imbedded links are different yet the content is the same. Again, not counting the 7
vgaplanets games I'm in, and the mailing lists I actually requested to be on, only 3 or 4
mails each week are genuine. If I don't connect to my email server over the weekend, I lose
posts because my mail quota has already been reached, thanks to spam.
So as far as freedom of speech goes, as far as I'm concerned, corporations and organizations
have no such right. The bill of rights is not for organizations, it is for people. Citizens.
"We The People"... not "We The Capitalist Machines"...
No organization's 'rights' should trump the individual's rights. Organizations do not vote,
people do. Organizations have no standing to influence public policy, the people do.
Our electorate do not represent organizations. They represent their constituents. Those
constituents aren't organizations, they're people.
When was the last time you asked your company who it voted for in an election?
Hmmm... ok, I didn't intent to rant, but ok, I'm ranting... so I'll quit now...
-- Smoov
(slightly pissed off)
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum, cogito.
Well, I wasn't saying that I liked the idea that it set a precedent, just that it does. The problem with the 'Do-Not-Call List' according to the courts wasn't that people's rights were being violated, it was that some people were exempt from obeying the list, like politicians and charities. That's only enforcing the rights of certain organizations and not those of others. This is what I meant in my previous comment. Though I agree with you and don't believe that the phone call is a method of 'free expression' but the courts seem to disagree. Go figure.
Speak for yourself.