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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?"
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.
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.
Most processors actively turn the clock off to parts of the chip that are not being used. So when you are doing nothing the processor is doing much less than when you have the computer do something.
From what i understand,
if you are useing an overclocked Intel chip,
then yes, as they change the cycles to suite
the load and heat, you may age the chip,
but the ageing is only slight.
On AMD chips, they run the same weather under
load or not, so theres no ageing there.
Most of the damage to chips happens durning
booting up, powering down and spikes and surges.
Overclocking's Impact on CPU Life
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Actually, if you live in a warm area you have to pay for the power used in the distibuted computing twice. First in the compter and then in the removal process; air condition.
But most people don't live in a are where they need to run either air condition or some form of oven 24/7 so the balance is mixed.
Distributed computing is not a very efficient use of power since many of the computers are old and power up unnecessarily hardware. But the extra costs are distributed on so many individuals that it doesn't matter anyway. Power is cheap in industralised countries (maybe too cheap) so the difference between a $100 and a $120 power bill is minimal.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Hard disks are more reliable in my experience than CPUs too.
You living in Bizarro world? Or are you just an overclocker?
How could a mechanical hard drive be more reliable than a solid-state CPU? Hard drive failures are a well-known problem, which even makes its way into primetime sitcoms. Everyone knows someone who's drive crashed. Rumors fly that the latest batch of Seagate or Western Digital may have jinxy spindles.
But stop a pedestrian and ask him when he last heard of a CPU burnout- you'll get a puzzled look. Since I don't OC, I've never lost a CPU. But my stack of dead IDE drives is tall on the bookcase.
Even amoung Slashdot users, I'm sure a show of hands would reveal that far many more people have suffered from unpredictable failures of an HD than a CPU.
(Google says that "hard drive reliability" is nearly twice as common a topic as "CPU reliability")
The most you`d hope to get out of it is `yes, there are other civilisations out there`, and I already know that.
You'd get two things, sequentially:
1. Not just knowledge, but PROOF. That you followed Sagan's "billions & billions" calculations is one thing. That everyone else KNOWS its true is another. Potentially, this could change the terrestrial balance of power. (More likely, resistant groups will deny the proof, but they'll at least be marginalized somewhat)
2. Later you'd get actual translations of the messages. Who could predict the value of alien wisdom and folly?
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.
But the extra costs are distributed on so many individuals that it doesn't matter anyway.
It is exactly this sort of thinking which leads to large-scale environmental problems, our tendency being to avoid responsibility when the blame is spread thin enough.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
There's nowhere else for the energy consumed by a P4 to go except to be dissipated as heat. The only way it makes sense to talk about a "more efficient" heater is if you have a heater that puts the heat specifically where you want it, like on your face or whatever.