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Junk Super Computer Assimilates All

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the one-mans-trash-is-another-mans-computer dept.

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."

35 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. veggie oil? by Evoluder · · Score: 2, Insightful

    is it really cheaper than plain old power company? maybe it scales cheaper?

    1. Re:veggie oil? by blincoln · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you look at a typical utility bill you're talking pennies a kilowatt hour.

      I think their idea is to counteract the concept that for the same amount of power, they could be running much more powerful hardware. If the electricity comes from coal, they're wasting energy, but if it comes from biodiesel they're... uh... wasting energy in a way that sounds good to hippies?

      --
      "...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
    2. Re:veggie oil? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      yeah, 23 pennies.

    3. Re:veggie oil? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Or 3) is sustainable.

      The big problem with coal and oil power is that they use a resource that effectively does not regenerate on a human scale. While there's nothing *really* wrong with digging up oil and burning it (except pollution, which you mentioned), it's kinda dumb to be dependent on it, because it *is* going to run out at some point. It doesn't take a geologist to do the math there.

    4. Re:veggie oil? by Eivind · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Curious, I thought with an efficient enough fuel cell (run off natural gas) you could generate power in your home, avoid the inefficiency of losing power during the power line travel...

      Yes. But you'd add the inefficiency of having to transport the natural gas somehow. Which also costs energy. No, natural gas floating in pipes is *not* obviously that much more energy-efficient than electrons floating in wires, it depends on the details. (one thick pipe offers less friction than many small ones, higher voltage power-lines give lower losses)

      if I remember my physics, correctly, the power lost during transmission is proportional to i^2 where i is the current.

      Yeah. In absolute terms. But offcourse in this case your power transmitted is higher too, so your losses, measured as a percentage, doesn't go up that rapidly.

      The oposite is also true though: If you up the voltage, then you can scale back the current needed for a certain power by the same amount, which leads to lower losses. Multiply your voltage by 10, and you can divide current by 10, and still transmit the same power. But at 1/10th the current, this means, by your formula, that the losses are now only 1/100th of what they where.

      I thought the process of transforming the energy to and from that state was fairly inefficient (but better then sending it down the power line without doing it. It's been a long time.

      Where'd you get that idea ? Large transformers achieve efficiencies in the 99.75% range, and even the small ugly wall-wart transformers that are mass-made at a buck a piece from the cheapest possible materials frequently manage to come in at 95%

      It's like the fact that modern day farms are actually far less efficient then ones from 100 years ago, from an energy perspective.

      Yes. But only from that perspective, which isn't the one we're trying to optimise for. Our current economical system optimises for production-efficiency. And a single person working on a farm produces probably 100 times more than a single person working on a farm did 100 years ago.

      Energy isn't lacking. Not even *clean* energy is lacking, there's plenty of it to go around. The only reason it's not dominant is that currently non-clean energy is cheaper. It's perfectly possible to make clean energy enough to supply current and forseeable needs. But the thing is, with current tech it costs more. I don't know the numbers for US, but for example in Norway wind-power costs double of normal power (which is hydro with us, so also clean, but let's ignore that). In Germany there's a minimum prize given for home-produced energy of $0,50 or so, which is more than enough to make it a paying proposition (i.e. you make a *profit* by installing solar-cells on your roof), but which also happens to be like 4 times the price of conventional power.

      A farm using only clean energy would still be a hell of a lot more efficient than the ones 100 years ago. But thing is: it'd be *less* (financially) efficient than the farms that burn oil. So that's what's happening.

      But the scale is slowly tipping. The price of oil and gas has raised a lot, and ist likely to raise a lot more. The price of solar, wind, hydro, thermal and so on has all been falling steadily, and will continue to do so.

    5. Re:veggie oil? by xnixman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  2. learn from the flashmob supercomputer by stevetures · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:learn from the flashmob supercomputer by Darth_brooks · · Score: 4, Informative

      The biggest problem you can run into with older machines is the lack of support for things that make building a cluster easy. The two biggest things I ran into were:

      -Wake On LAN support is huge, so that rules out the old machines with the clicky power switch.
      -Trying to do anything with less than 32 megs of RAM is a PITA.

      On top of that older machines don't always have a NIC, so you're stuck scrounging for parts. Plus who knows what kind of cryptic Acer-Packard Bell-eMachines crap hardware you're going to get via donations (so building a boot image can be a pain), so you're opening youself up to tracking down odd bits of unsupported yet essential hardware drivers (PCI Controllers stand out.)

      Clustering gets way easier when you can stick to at least the same general system brand (e.g. Dell) or even better, identical systems.

      --
      There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
    2. Re:learn from the flashmob supercomputer by caffeinemessiah · · Score: 2, Interesting

      absolutely. we had a bunch of old P3s lying around with about 256mb each. i spent some time putting them into a cluster because the departmental servers were overloaded. turned out that it just wasn't useful. the overloaded dual-opteron server with 4 gigs of ram ran a set of intensive experiments faster than the p3s could crank out their stuff. from my gross, empirical estimates, 5 p3s w/256mb each == 1 overloaded dual-opteron server at fairly I/O intensive tasks. Don't even want to think about power/heat issues.

      --
      An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
  3. The Question Remaining by neoshroom · · Score: 3, Funny

    So, they have a network of recycled computers...
    ...being run by a generator using veggie oil...
    ...to render 3D images.

    So the only question remaining is: What are they rendering?

    My guess: PETA's new 3D logo.

    __

    Custom Research Paper

    --
    Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
  4. What I hated about that place... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...was that they want money to take your stuff. If you don't mind a drive, Video Only will take monitors (and TV's) for FREE! And displays are the hardest things to get rid of.

    As for PC's, there is a charity in Berkeley that takes donated PC's, refurbs. them and gives them to families that can't afford a computer.

    The City of Albany (next door to Berkeley) had a day where you could take almost any kind of electronic device and dispose of it for free (no large applicances). They plan on doing this yearly during the summer - the program runs for a few weeks. If you have a friend who lives there (ID required) - ask them to help you take your stuff.

    JUST DON'T PAY SOMEONE TO DO IT!!!!!

    1. Re:What I hated about that place... by operagost · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
  5. Re:You must warn them all! by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Funny

    Soon they'll be breeding us like cattle!

    Yeah... I'm not holding my breath. Quit trying to get our hopes up...

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
  6. What a colossal... by Harry+Balls · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...waste of electricity.
    State-of-the-art computers are probably about 15 times as fast as Pentium II-based computers, and consume maybe twice as much electricity.
    Or take Pentium M-based computers, they consume less electricity than Pentium II-based computers and are probably about 10 times as fast.

    Just my 2 cents.

    --
    Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
    1. Re:What a colossal... by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:What a colossal... by tux_deamon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think the point is is that the equipment being used is old discarded hardware. New fast computers cost money. This organization is reusing this old hardware and keeping it out of a landfill.

    3. Re:What a colossal... by Elastri · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Electricity costs money too, and it keeps costing money even after the initial capital purchase (or lack-there-of). If you're building a cluster powerful enough to be comparable with even a couple low-mid end modern PCs you're not going to be running for too long before you hit the point where the power savings makes the modern PCs less expensive. A more thorough explanation can be found in these two posts from a beowulf mailing list:

      http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2003-March/009658.h tml
      http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2003-March/009662.h tml

  7. Reminds me of days of yore.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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.

  8. Worth it? by Galahad2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder if the power consumption of a low-end Pentium 2 is actually worth the computation capability it could contribute to a network. There's definitely a point at which it costs more to run a computer than you can get out of it -- where does that line fall?

    1. Re:Worth it? by bear_phillips · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A good point, but a better question is which is more power efficient: 1) running 4 old dontated computers or 2) building and manufacturing a new computer.

      --
      http://www.windmeadow.com/
  9. Yes, but... by zpeterz63 · · Score: 4, Funny

    will it run Windows?

  10. And hence... by Null+Perception · · Score: 2, Funny

    The first borg cube was created. Resistance is futile. F34r the Pentium Pros.

    --
    Great new book on Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
  11. Re:Why give them to a million dollar university ? by why-did-I-wakeup · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They are doing something: learning. They are having fun and at the same time learning about parrallel computing. I'm jealous of them; I would love to have lots of old crap that I could set up and run some sort of parallel computing software. Not to mention this hardware is basically unusable so the poor african towns could possibly have more trouble setting the stuff up than they are worth. Especially if they have to put in a connection to the internet. That could be hundreds of thousands of US dollars to do if the village is far away from a city.

    --
    Most people would rather be certain they're miserable than risk being happy.
  12. Re:Make Faire by Somegeek · · Score: 2, Funny
    Make Faire = Do Do

    Bit redundant, do do you think?

    I dunno, let's see, convert to binary, look for redundant bits...
    --
    And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
  13. Saw this years ago on 20/20 or 60min by ScrewTivo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It was amazing what they were doing way back then. Before discussing the practicality of this you have to remember that a lot of what they do is teaching people about computers and providing refurbished computers to the poor. So now they get to learn about building super computers, it doesn't make a difference if a new multi-core system can outperform it or not, it's the lesson that is important. And tossing in a bio-diesel generator is precious!

    BTW, he was talking of building a supercomputer way back then. So the group has put some thought into this.

    If this turns out that it actually has some horsepower I can't wait to hear how it is put to use. The guy who started this is way ahead of the curve. Turning garbage into a self powered supercomputer...kewl!!

    --
    Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
  14. Re:Why give them to a million dollar university ? by tux_deamon · · Score: 3, Informative

    The ACCRC is a charity based in Berkeley, California. It is not affiliated with with the University of California at Berkeley.

  15. Re:MFLOPS/W by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 2

    Probably Power5. However, to use desktop processors as the example: I have some benchmarks of a code I've run on machines from a DEC Alpha 21064 through a current G5 2.0.. The timings that matter here are jobs that took 107 seconds on a PII/400 now take 7. The speedup is about constant across the series, so we're looking at a 15x speed-up on my current code versus a PII/400. Since this particular package runs at about the same speed on comparable clock-rate Opterons/G5s, we can infer a probable 15x speedup (30x if they're using PII/266, with the slower bus), for less than twice the power. (250W vs 400W). OTOH, that 400W PS powers two processors, which claim to pull in the >40W range when under load.

    In short, as long as you avoid Itanium-2 and certain late P4-Xeons, any modern machine will deliver a pretty acceptable flop/watt rating. This, regrettably, means that while their heart is in the right place, Berkeley's stunt, even if using biodesiel as fuel, would be more efficient if they scrapped the old computers, and used the money to buy a current Mac Mini or two to offer as compute servers. In my last job, even with the institution supplying power as 'overhead', certain machines no longer delivered enough performance to justify them occupying a plug and 9 sq ft of floor space, even if they did work fine. If I had been directly billed for what they consumed versus what they produced, they would have been dumpster-bound years earlier.

    This doesn't mean that they shouldn't refurb the old machines, stick an OS and some user-land software on them, and hand them (or sell them cheaply) to potential users for desktop usage, but as a cluster, they're not likely to earn their keep.

    --
    the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
  16. Experimentation by ComputerJerk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  17. Re:Moore's law... by diablomonic · · Score: 2

    Which is fairly linearly related to how many cores and therefore how much computing power you can fit on a chip..... :|

    --
    watch "the money masters" on google video
  18. Re:You must warn them all! by diablomonic · · Score: 2, Insightful

    only the Stud Bulls get to breed, and if you were going to be classed as one of those, I dont think youd be needing the help

    --
    watch "the money masters" on google video
  19. Re:Why give them to a million dollar university ? by omeomi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I worked at a computer lab through college. There was a mountain of old computers and monitors stacked in the back of one of the lesser-used labs. I asked once why they didn't give them to charity, or sell them or something. It turned out that the paperwork to get rid of them was more of a pain than it was worth. So they just sat there taking up space...hooray for red tape.

    --
    ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
  20. Back to the Future by craXORjack · · Score: 2, Funny

    Dr. Emmett Brown: Marty, I'm sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning.

    Marty McFly: [startled] What did you say?

    Dr. Emmett Brown: A bolt of lighting. Unfortunately, you never know when or where it's ever gonna strike.

    Marty McFly: Hmmmm... What about vegetable oil?

    Dr. Emmett Brown: Well of course, vegetable oil. But where are we going to get vegetable oil in 1955?

    --
    Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
  21. Some sample energy consumption figures... by SuperBanana · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just for comparison's sake, I borrowed some Kill-A-Watt meters and measured my gear.

    • Powerbook 1ghz 17": Idling, about 15w, full-bore 29W or so
    • Dual P3-850 2U rackmount: 150W
    • Dual 2Ghz G5 Xserve rackmount: 175W
    • Mac Mini 1.25ghz: Idling, 11W, full bore, about ~25W
    • Celeron (original celeron) 450mhz PC. No hard drives, one CPU fan, one PSU fan, floppy, 2 net cards, CDROM drive. 65W, idling (running a bsd-based firewall.)

    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.
  22. I wish them luck... by teebob21 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  23. I did this once by DurendalMac · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.