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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?
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.
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Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
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
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
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.
... 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 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?
will it run Windows?
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.
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
The ACCRC is a charity based in Berkeley, California. It is not affiliated with with the University of California at Berkeley.
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.
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.