Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

"Nightlife" Harnesses Idle Fedora Nodes For Research

Posted by timothy on from the deserves-an-award-for-the-name-alone dept.

A. B. VerHausen writes "If you've given up on SETI, now you can let your idle computer help with other kinds of scientific research. Red Hat employee Bryan Che started a project called Nightlife. He wants people to 'donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power.'" Che hopes to have more than a million Fedora nodes running as part of this project.

7 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about by Nursie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's the not-so-idle electricty bill that'll turn up when I let people use my PC's spare cycles all the time.

    That's why it's off, in stand by or auto throttling the processor. That's why letting people use your "idle" cycles is not as simple a charitable proposition as it sounds.

    1. Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about by abolitiontheory · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What's the actual difference in energy costs, though? Not saying you're stupid or selfish for not donating, just interested in the real figures, if you've got any. I throw my system into hibernation most nights, and try to turn off the monitor at least when I go away for a couple hours during the day. What have you found your general savings to be?

    2. Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about by Nursie · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Real figures?

      I don't know, but given that people have PSUs rated from 250W - 1KW these days, I would have thought fairly significant, assuming a pretty high utilisation of "spare" cycles.

      I know we've managed to cut our electricity bill in half lately by moving to energy saving bulbs and making sure we actually switch stuff off at the socket when it's not in use.

      Also, there's that whole "not using more than you need" thing to do with electricity having to come from somewhere, and that simewhere usually being a source of CO2 and other nasties.

    3. Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about by abolitiontheory · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ... making sure we actually switch stuff off at the socket ... I keep trying to think of a funny and poignant way to point out that we Americans don't have the slightest notion of this concept, because its not built into to our electrical system. I'm sure you could get switches at the sockets if you intentionally looked for them, but I was 21 before I ever knew of this concept, from going over to England to visit family. It's one of those small details that sticks in your head, kind of like slang words or Cadbury chocolate. American chocolate is rubbish.
    4. Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about by swillden · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You can go for a happy medium. Configure your system to keep the processors scaled back to minimum clock speed and then use the idle cycles. The power consumption will go up as compared to a completely idle system, but not very much, and you'll still have a lot of cycles to donate. Also, your machine should be able to sustain that load without speeding up the fans.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  2. Re:It's a bit nebulous by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Err... I've read TFA and all I can see is that some guy would like to use spare Fedora cpu cycles for some sort of project but he doesn't know what and he's not really sure how. My immediate response is come back when you've got something concrete
    Hmph. Sounds just like a PHB when they propose a new development project. "Well, see, we want to use [ SAP | Lotus Notes | Teamcenter | other complex technology here ], but we're not really sure how we'd use it. For fsck's sake, if you don't already know HOW you would use something, you probably DON'T NEED IT!
    --
    My blog
  3. Mac users can do something like this already... by Dekortage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Since Mac OS 10.4 and later come with Xgrid already installed, it's very easy for your spare processor cycles to be donated to science. A few clicks in your System Preferences, and you're done.

    --
    $nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts