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Harvesting & Reusing Idle Computer Cycles
Hustler writes "More on the University of Texas grid project's mission to integrate numerous, diverse resources into a comprehensive campus cyber-infrastructure for research and education. This article examines the idea of harvesting unused cycles from compute resources to provide this aggregate power for compute-intensive work."
There are several non-commercial distributed computing systems, so the GridMP system isn't anything particularly new or groundbreaking. However, in companies that run very resource intensive applications and simulations, such a distributed system that uses unused CPU cycles has some serious applications.
However, the most critical aspect of this type of system is not just that the application in question is just multithreaded, but that it be multithreaded based on the GridMP APIs. To do such would require either a significant rewrite of existing code or a rewrite of it from scratch. This is not a minor undertaking, by any means.
If the performance of the application and every cycle counts, then that investment is definitely worth it.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
"wasted compute cycles" aren't free. I would assert they're not even "wasted".
No doubt in the era of idle loops and HLT instructions unused processor capacity does yield benefits. However from the perspective of a large organization (such as a large corporation, or a large university), it is waste if they have thousands of very powerful CPUs distributed throughout their organization, yet they have to spend millions on mainframes to perform computational work.
I saw some some posters from the fraunhofer institute in germany on the subject of power, with a graph of specint/watt.
0. all modern cores switch off idle things (like the FPU) and have done for some time.
1. those opteron cores have best in class performance
2. intel centrino cores, like the i740, have about double the specint/watt figure. That means they do their computation twice as efficiently.
In a datacentre, power and air conditioning costs are major operational expenses. If we can move to lower power cores there -and have adaptive aircon that cranks back the cooling when the system is idle, the power savings would be significant. of course, putting the datacentre somewhere cooler with cheap non-fossil-fueled electicity (like British Columbia) is also a good choice.
Your choices are:
Note that the solution in this article is obviously not free due to electricity and other support costs, but it is undoubtedly cheaper than buying your own cluster and then paying for electricity and the support costs.