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Junk Super Computer Assimilates All
VonGuard writes "The ACCRC is the relatively famous computer recycling non-profit in Berkeley that builds clusters out of old hardware. Make Blog has an article about the Center's plans to build a cluster out of the equipment people bring to recycle at Make Faire later this month. The ACCRC geeks are now able to integrate PII's or better into the cluster, which will be powered by Vegetable Oil and run Parallel Knoppix."
Hmm... they tried this piecemeal supercomputer at my university (university of san francisco). From what I understood, they accepted a lot of low-spec computers that actually caused more problems than they served to compute. http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/ Can anyone confirm on my specific point?
... the old Stone Soup Supercomputer was the first I can remember that used cast-off computers to generate (what passed for) Serious Horsepower. Tempus fugit, indeed.
I've found that PII/PIII based computers can be pretty efficient. I have a PIII 500MHz computer that measured to consume 40W total at the wall jack, so that's counting PSU inefficiency too. You are right that some of the latest computers can produce far more FLOPS per watt, but electricity is pretty cheap compared to the cost of a new computer. That 40W computer might consume $40 worth of electricity per year, it's hard to argue that spending money on new computers would be better from an electricity cost perspective such that it outweighs the computer cost. Administration costs might be different matter though, but if you are working from volunteers or students, that can be cheap too, and quite an educational experience.
Personally, I think experimenting with computers is a good thing. Maybe it's not a feasible solution to a problem, but experimenting generates new ideas. I see a lot of people saying "Oh, give your burnt out computer to the poor.". Well, if you want to be so generous with the poor, give them a computer that's worth having. Personally, I think giving a computer to someone that's too poor to buy it themself is a waste of a good computer. If they can't afford to buy the computer, they probably can't afford to access the internet, they certainly can't afford to buy any software for it, essentially all they get out of it is the ability to have a very large free paperweight that allows them to play solitaire when they don't feel like working to buy a real computer. If you have a computer to donate, I think this would be the perfect type of program to donate it to, at least it will get used and people may even learn something from it.
20" Monitors? Amazing at the time. So I lifted one...or tried to because apparently they have plutonium in them or something, it weighed 80 lbs it seemed. Got a cart, loaded it up, raced home, wife rolled her eyes...and then I realized you can't plug them into your Gateway PC without an adapter.
ummm...and that's the end of my story.
Just for comparison's sake, I borrowed some Kill-A-Watt meters and measured my gear.
The shocker was how low the Mini's power consumption was, and how high the celeron router. Also, the Xserve, Mini, and Dual P3 all had power factors of .99, whereas the celeron had a power factor of about .6...ie, not power-factor corrected.
Oh, and switchgear? Varied from 1W (yes, ONE watt!) to ELEVEN for an old 100BaseT switch. The lowest power consumers were newer hubs, second by a pair of gigabit switches I bought within the last year that were about 5-7W.
Please help metamoderate.
I got excited about cluster computing a couple years back. I spent about $600 on parts for a 12-node Pentium II cluster, then spent 3 weeks setting it all up. I then spent another 6 weeks with a comp sci professor trying to reverse-engineer the Folding at Home client to parallelize the data units. (Psst...don't tell Vijay!) Our solution was to use the F@H client as-is, and to network the nodes as additional drives and run a client with a different machine ID on each drive.
As it turned out, a single 1.1GHz P3 was doing more folding than 12 350MHz P2's working in parallel. I scrapped the cluster and sold the parts on eBay. My electricity bill dropped about $100 a month afterwards. Again, I wish them luck.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
If it costs more to recycle something than to store in a safe location where it will not pollute, then it is not worth recycling. In the end, you're expending more energy to recycle it than you are taking in. The ACCRC's passing it on to the donater (no good deed goes unpunished) is a cheap way of hiding that cost. Obviously, we don't want lead dumped in Chinese rivers ("we" obviously doesn't include the Chinese enslavers/bureaucrats) so if you can't have it recycled efficiently, then you might as well have it crushed under tons of dirt in a contained area. It's no wonder we can't get people out of the disposable mindset when the well-meaning are penalized.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
With 16 old Beige G3s, Mac OS 10.2.8, and XGrid PR2. Yeah, it was crap, but I did it just to do it. I got all sixteen running and ran some of the Xgrid scripts, but beyond that, I had no use for the damn thing. I only had 10Mbps hubs anyway. Built the thing for next to nothing, too.
Nothing is sustainable across a long enough span of time.
If we were talking hydrogen, you'd be complaining about using up our water for fuel.
The trick is to adapt, and we will, we always do. Malthus was only wrong because things change.
When the usual price of energy creeps too high this will create a profit motive for additional research and development as well as making higher priced alternatives more attractive as the economics change. (And no, even at $3 a gallon our energy is still insanely cheap)
Panicing about something that will not happen for 100+ years is silly and counter productive, consider the changes over the last 100 years as evidence.