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Students Power Supercomputer with Bicycles
inkslinger77 writes "A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedaling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC). They powered a SiCortex SC648 supercomputer with a Linux cluster of 648 CPUs and almost 1TB of main memory in a single cabinet. The system is low-powered and draws 1,200 watts without needing special power supplies or cooling..."
One MIT student is how many foot pounds per second?
So, the students don't run Linux... they bicycle it instead!
A Beowulf cluster of bicycle-laden MIT students.
I feel suddenly dirty.
imagine how long the students of any other university would be able to power them!
In the future, which I imagine shall be very much like "Mad Max", this is what shall be required to run SP3 of Windows Vista....
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Oh great, next they'll invent SkyNet.
If one of those guys goes by the nick 'Neo', I'm gonna get worried.
They should have just gone over to the nearest administrative offices and unplugged all of the CRTs running "screen savers". This would have freed power to run the computer even longer and wouldn't have been as tiring.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Not really that useful and interesting How about taking a look into "powered by kicking" technology, make it available to the average joe, millions of kWh of power will be saved across the globe on a daily basis from frustrated computer users
It used to be research.
Then little errands. Get the professor a coke, pick up his stuff.
Then acting as tech support.
Then doing all the prof's work for him.
And now... running the system by the sweat of your brow.
We must draw the line somewhere, folks. Free labor has its limits!
This cannot bode well for graduate students... well... maybe for the chunky among us... but let's hope this doesn't catch on. I can already see profs carried about on the shoulders to and from meetings...
Thanks for degrading Slashdot. Jerk.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
An Excerpt from the article:: "An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts, according to SiCortex CEO John Mucci." Yea, my sister's p4-HT 3GHZ laptop CPU only takes 88 watts max. I guess they meant the average power consumption of the whole laptop, averaging across all models on the market? Well, obviously the statement in the article is bogus. http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL7DT
"A spokesperson said that the human-powered session produced more computations than took place in the first 3,000 years of civilization." Except that they didn't pedal enough cover the development and manufacturing costs.
Oh man, I had written the below ages ago, and now there's a relevant story on /. ! ;-D )
(yes I could claim prior art but I'm not SCO
!!! welcome to the ENIAC democompo!!!
We are happy to announce the opening of the first demoparty dedicated to the ENIAC.
If you wish to participate, please agree to observe the following party rules:
1) Bring your own ENIACs. We do not want to see viruses on our system.
2) If you plug your ENIAC to the wall power plug, the PC, Amiga and Atari ST demomakers will saw your head off. At your own risk.
3) To give electrical power to your machine, we provide a bicycle room with attached generators. Please let us know a week in advance of the size of your group, so that we can get enough bicycles for everyone.
4) You are responsible of finding your own spot in the party room. Our ENIAC is already taking half of the available space.
5) It is forbidden to step on the wires.
6) "Flame" demo effects are forbidden. When we tried to achieve one, the vacuum tubes caught fire and we had to call 911. They were not very happy about it.
7) It is forbidden to spray paint graffiti on our ENIAC.
8) Domestic animals are forbidden. We will not pay for any damage caused by the stench of burned fur coming out of relay boxes.
9) You are responsible looking after your ENIAC. Dishonest persons may want to steal it at night.
10) It is STRICTLY forbidden to sleep on top of the ENIAC units.
11) Bring your own spare vacuum tubes and resistors. If you forget them you can buy them at the party but we will set the price... don't say we didn't tell you...
12) Musical creations are forbidden. Our musician tried to compose something and provoked the death of five dogs while trying to complete "Woof Woof ZAPPP !!", played with his newly created Music Tracker "LiveWireDogeeh".
13) Graphical creations are forbidden. Our graphist found a horrible death after making a vacuum tube box explode in an attempt to automatically create a drawing of Pamela Anderson on the floor with the glass shards. The result was not so great anyways.
14) The Bicycle Room has an excellent drink vending machine [rubs hands].
15) The coders are not allowed to access the ENIAC switches while the demo is running.
16) Any vacuum tube that fries during the demo cannot be replaced.
17) The "Plasma", "Shadebobs" or "Lens" demo effects are forbidden. Our coder placed some pot in the relay box so that we were stoned by the smoke and saw all kind of weird stuff.
18) If somebody does not respect these rules, people may be pissed off and quit the ENIAC scene !
The competition prices are as follows:
1. A brand new ENIAC
2. A Z80 building kit for every member of the group.
3. A box of General Electric vacuum tubes.
Good luck !
The ENIAC Demo Competition
If the children walk in and become cyborgs, they won't be hungry!
maybe the students could save more energy by spending that time on optimizing their code....
...I really like the idea of low-powered computing. In the last week we already saw a SSD 'disk' with SATA interface presented here that only uses .3Watts. We may not call our PDA's supercomputers these days, but one day in the past, the Big Iron systems used as supercomputing stations were slower than our PDA's can emulate them.
to solve two prominent US problems: Too much CO2 output due to excessive energy consumption and a lot of overweight people. Solution: have them power something by pedaling for a little longer than 20 minutes, though.
OK, so they broke the record for human-powered computing. But what was the previous record? Was there even such a thing as a previous record? How is this new record actually measured? You know that more people will now try to break the MIT mark, and TFA is rather scant on details...
Well fuck me dead, somebody has figured out how to convert mechanical work into electrical energy. Trust those whacky kids at MIT to pull it off.
What I find impressive is the fact that apparently, the average power output of each cyclist was at least 120 W. I remember seeing someone use a bike generator to make a 40 W bulb dimly flicker when I was a kid. Either generators have gotten a heck of a lot more efficient or these people are serious athletes.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"...without needing special power supplies..."
Someone must have missed something.
And they thought finals time was exhausting before.
From the title i thought that the MIT dudes where actually recycling bicycles to power the super computer. Using the back to the future, rubbish reactor.
This will become a requirement for grad students now?
Ahem. Sorry...
This is amazing! Just imagine what they could accomplish if they tried to do something useful, innovative, or even - technologically challenging.
Ace
Beowulf cluster of XO OLPCs anyone? ;-)
Indeed, what's so special about a power-supply consisting of 10 MIT students? Nothing really...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Now that's the way to do it. Not just the environmentally friendly power generation, but the performance per Watt of the computer, too. According to an article at The Register, the SC648 is built from MIPS (the type of CPU) cores that run at 500 MHz and execute two intructions per cycle. That should work out to about 1000 MIPS (the performance unit) per core, which, according to el Reg, the SC648 has 2916 of. In other words, these students got 2.9 million MIPS for 1200 Watts. That's some 2400 MIPS per Watt! How does a typical home PC compare to that?
Note: I might have gotten the number of cores wrong, in which case the results are also wrong. Supposing there were 648 cores (which the Slashdot summary may imply), it would work out to 648 thousand MIPS for 1200 Watts, or 540 MIPS per Watt. I don't think my (still low power at 20W) PC can come close to that (assuming the VIA C7 at 1.2 GHz does 1200 MIPS, it would be 60 MIPS per Watt...).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Here you find a good overview of the possibilities of wind up power and bicycle machines
Please allow me to offer the Geekaflop, which will be defined as the number of gigaflops per bag of Chitos, as determined by the weight loss of 10 MIT students pedaling flat-out for 10 minutes to keep the supercomputer powered up.
The new term would be abbreviated "HaM"(Hamster Megacycles), thereby incorporating the longstanding scientific truism "We stand on the shoulders of giants".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I've done some research into it, and I figure you're probably better off buying one of the 12W foldable solar panels (or the rollable ones, but they're even more expensive, and give even worse W/area), and tying it down over your Panniers than to use some kind of generator system on a bike. On the upside, depending on the rest of system, next years ultra mobile parts based on Intel's Silverthorne ought to be pretty awesome for this kind of thing, and hopefully offer performance in the range of 500Mhz Pentium 3's.
Next week it will be: Hamster Powers (Super)notebook with Hamster Wheel
This is a particularly satisfying story to me. When I was writing my pulp scifi novella The Bikes of New York (in which the poor pedal generator bicycles for spare change) I was told by many snotty self-proclaimed debunkers that human beings could never generate a meaningful amount of power using their bodies, and some of them had all sorts of intimidating mathematics to prove their points.
This story seems to show that their rigour was limp, and their points pointless.
Hooray for a legitimate basis for my surreal vision! Nerd on, MIT.
These stories are free but worth money.
Well congrats, Tony and Wilson and Peter and all my other SiCortex buddies I hope you sell a ton of them. Wilson recently gave an interesting talk about verifying the SiCortex system and ASICs http://www.veripool.com/papers.html. He's also a huge open source contributor.
/Ed - not affiliated with SiCortex
Maybe this would be a good way to powersupply future OLPC:s?
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
Then this exercise should be (HPC)^2, right?
I once took part in a nutrition study that required each participant to ride a stationary bicycle for 20 min or so. I asked the lead researcher how much power a typical college student could produce. He said a healthy college student could produce about 180W for the duration of a test session.
The test itself was uncomfortable. There was no breeze to keep you cool (and, since the human body is only about 25% efficient, that meant you were dissipating > 500 W as heat), and you had to wear a mouthpiece to measure your oxygen uptake.
For that reason, I'm a little surprised that 10 cyclists without mouthpieces could only produce 1.2 kW for 20 min. Either their generators, drive mechanisms, and converters are not very efficient (most likely) or the MIT students need to do more exercise to get in better shape.
As the saying goes: If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it.
Anyway, could you ask your buddies to put up some suggested retail prices on their web?
send + more == money?
The students' special power supply and cooling, OTOH, came from beer! (Free, of course!)
We could put the MIT students in a blender and turn them into biofuel. Anyone?
Ugggh, Thanks a lot.
Now when machines take over the world we're going to have to peddle our fat asses off instead of sitting in a tank of goo eating food all day.
I mean... I for one welcome our new bicycle-toting machine overlords. Please bring the goo-tanks.
> They powered a SiCortex SC648 supercomputer with a Linux cluster of 648 CPUs...
For those that aren't sure how watts measure up on a bicycle, use this calculator to figure out what equivalent speed that is. http://www.kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm
I didn't think that humans could generate this much stable and continuous power.
It reminds me of this idea I submitted to the Global Ideas bank.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
... I ate chicken sandwich today.
Oh I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about pointless things that happened today.
Finally they've found the way to make strong nerds. The MIT Army. Watch out bullys!
These people put out 1.2 kW. Here in California, 1 kWh costs about $0.12 at residential rates. $0.14 for an hour of this vs. paying ten people to pedal for an hour? I'm sorry, the standard generation methods are far superior.
Supercomputer = 100 Fastest Computers in the world... This was NOT a super computer. But then again this is slashdot, so we'll gladly ignore the facts for a flashy headline...
The brain consumes somewhere around 20 watts, and the estimated processing power of the human brain is somewhere between 10 and 100000 teraflops, with a storage capacity somewhere in the terabyte range. Now, we enjoy that processing power while completely at rest, without having to exert ourselves at all. Granted, our architecture isn't suited for some of the tasks a supercomputer is put to, on the other hand there are many incredibly rudimentary thinking tasks that the computer cannot perform no matter how powerful it is.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Says the calculator.
A general rule of thumb is that one barrel of oil is the energy equivalent of about one year of hard labor for a human.
Depends on your definition of "meaningful", doesn't it? Ten people pedaling to run a supercomputer sounds nice, but the energy equivalent is two 60-watt bulbs per person. Think about the energy needs of even a very small apartment. You've got lights, appliances, chargers, dozens of things that we plug in to main power. Even one that's heated with natural gas still needs electricity to run the blower, and then there's air conditioning, a real power hog. Modern life in the USA takes a lot of electricity, and human (or animal) muscle is never going to provide enough energy to make it a worthwhile source.
Just due to its shear number of server farms and servers - about 3 million nodes recent estimate. On the other hand they may hold the contrarian position as lowest power consumption per peta-op/peta-byte due to their attention to decreasing power costs (and green concern).
Human powered generators aren't a new idea. They've been done before. You'd think MIT students, with all their knowledge, would try to tackle a project that is a little more challenging than this. The contest was called Innovate or Die. They must have died, because I don't see any innovation?
For years, drivers have been putting "My other car is a Porche" bumper stickers on their cars. I guess now we will see cyclists putting "My other bike runs Linux" stickers on their mudguards.
The "green" solution emits far more CO2 than a coal plant would have to produce that electricity.
I've always wondered why more gyms don't by equipment that gathers the excess electricity and sell it back to the power company. I bet the average Golds Gym probably puts out an incredible amount of power from all those machines.
Feed the grid with your ElectroExerBike! Now you too can reduce your waistline AND your electricity bill by up to $3.50 per month with only 6 hours of work per day!
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"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
IMO the real story is that they can run a 648-processor cluster on 1200 W.
To withstand a /.'ing?
Only one way to find out....
You people don't think the MIT kids are smart enough to recognize a publicity opportunity?
Found it for free online as it was: a 12 part online serial (in Memento format).
:P
Good luck selling 'dead tree' versions for 8.99
The Internet makes copyable interlectual property 'worth' essentially $0.00 (thanks to sites like The Pirate Bay) so the only entities making the REAL money on the net are:
1) Big Internet Service Providers like NetZero and AOL
2) Physical economy facilitators like eBay and Amazon or
3) Ad agencies disguised as search engines like Yahoo and Google.
I've come to the conclusion that all the Internet is good for nowadays for the 'small guy' is as source of information or entertainment -- nothing more, nothing less.
If you are a 'small guy' making money in an environment where intangibles are deemed as having 'no value' and not worth paying for if they can be obtained for free anyway, more power to you!