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."

Comments

electricity

[TedCheshireAcad]

Does anyone realize that running a CPU at 100% takes more electricity than running a CPU at 10%?

"wasted compute cycles" aren't free. I would assert they're not even "wasted".

Re:electricity

[ergo98]

"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.

Re:electricity

[hotdiggitydawg]

That's a very valid point, we should not assume that this usage comes at no cost to the environment. However, the cost of building and running a separate CPU dedicated to the same purpose is even higher - twice the hardware infrastructure (motherboards, cases, power supplies, what else? monitors, gfx cards, etc.), twice the number of cycles wasted loading software infrastructure (OS, drivers, frameworks eg. Java/Mono). Add to that the fact that hardware is not easily recycled and the "green" part of me suggests that cycle-sharing is a better idea than separate boxes.

The next question is - who pays for the electricity then? University departments are notorious for sqabbling over who picks up the tab for a shared resource - and that's not even considering the wider inclusion of home users...

Electricity vs cost of more machines and labor

[G4from128k]

Does anyone realize that running a CPU at 100% takes more electricity than running a CPU at 10%?

This is a very insightful post, but has two crucial counterarguments

1. Does anyone realize the cost of buying extra computers to handle peak computing loads?
2. Does anyone realize the cost of idle high-tech, high-paid labor while they wait for something to run?

The proper decision would balance these three (and other factors) in defining a portfolio of computing assets that can cost-effectively handle both baseline and peak computing loads. Idle CPUs aren't free, but then neither are idle people or surplus (turned-off) machines.

Re:Electricity vs cost of more machines and labor

[Alwin Henseler]

"The proper decision would balance these three (and other factors) in defining a portfolio of computing assets that can cost-effectively handle both baseline and peak computing loads."

You're probably right, but oh what a beautiful line of marketing-speak... If you happen to work in management or sales somewhere, write this baby down!

Re:Electricity vs cost of more machines and labor

[Poltras]

Worse, they contribue to global entropy, thus reducing universe lifetime... What are we doing?

Re:Electricity vs cost of more machines and labor

[bcrowell]

There are costs that fall on the person who's donating the cycles, and costs that fall on the person who's getting the benefit of them. Unless both people are in the same organization, operating under the same budget, it's not just a question of minimizing the total cost. In the typical situation, the cost to the donor needs to be almost zero, otherwise the donor isn't going to do it. Even in a university environment, one department may have a separate budget from another department. Or electricity may be provided from the campus without a budget charge to the departments, but other costs, like paying sysadmins, may be specific to the department.

Personally, I ran the SETI@home client and the Golomb ruler client for a while, but stopped because of a variety of factors:

1. It makes my configuration more complicated, and any time I buy a new computer or do a fresh install, it's one more chore to take care of.
2. I ran SETI@home for a while at work (on my own desktop hardware I brought from home, hooked into the network at the school where I teach), but I got scared when I heard stories about people getting fired for that kind of thing at other institutions. The network admins at my school are very uptight about this kind of thing, and don't have the same ethic of openness and sharing that most academics have.
3. If I run it at home, I'm paying for the extra electricity.
4. Most of the clients are closed source. I'm very reluctant to run closed-source software on any machine I maintain. You might say that the people who wrote the clients are trustworthy, well-known academics, not malicious Russian gangsters, but in my experience, most academics are actually pretty piss-poor, fly-by-night programmers. What if there's a security hole? Sure, the client described in TFA is supposed to be sandboxed, but how sure can I be that the sandboxing is really secure? I'm not normally particularly paranoid about security, but the rational approach to security is to weigh costs and benefits, and here the benefits to me are zero.

I think if grid computing is ever going to take off, it needs to become a capitalist enterprise. If someone would pay me a few bucks a day for my spare cycles, and the client was open-source, and there was close to zero hassle, I'd gladly do it. Remember, one of the good things about a free market is that it tends to be an efficient way to allocate resources.

CPU power consumption

[ergo98]

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050509/cual_core _athlon-19.html

60-100W difference between idle and full power consumption. That is not an insignificant amount of power.