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Harvesting & Reusing Idle Computer Cycles

Posted by Hemos on from the making-good-use-of-time-and-resources dept.

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."

1 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Re:electricity by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.