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?"

Comments

ram drive

[ih8apple]

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.