"Nightlife" Harnesses Idle Fedora Nodes For Research

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.

Comments

SETI

[pryoplasm]

There is also folding at home http://folding.stanford.edu/ that might help someones life more than software ever will.

I am all for open source, but there are some better places to donate some spare cpu cycles

Re:SETI

[morgan_greywolf]

Not to mention climate change prediction at home via climateprediction.net.

Re:SETI

[mwvdlee]

I guess that's irony; letting your computer consume large quantities of environmentally unfriendly produced electricity in order to calculate climate change.

Re:SETI

[somersault]

It's better to think of it as job security.

Re:SETI

[somersault]

Nightlife is usually what you do before you boink.

Re:SETI

[Danathar]

If you don't know what the guy is talking about, then don't comment.

Condor is WAY different than BOINC or Folding@home.

BOINC is middleware but NOT general purpose grid computing. Condor is a distributed batch oriented system that allows people to submitt jobs and get them done. You can configure BOINC to run as backfill to Condor when Condor is not being used.

Re:SETI

[Krigl]

I'd personally still prefer Folding@Home - climatology is way too complex, with lots of unexplained and speculative stuff. I'm not a scientist, but I'd guess this needs more basic research of underlying principles before brute force number crunching starts yielding useful results (any climatologist here?), not mentioning this project screams "junk science" out loud. And if they want internet community to get interested maybe someone should enlighten them about possibilities of different picture formats than 22 MB .bmp for high resolution histogram of global temperature change.

Folding@Home is useful and brings actual results - you'll get a chance to throw your own pack of frozen pea against Africa's hunger, instead throwing it into wastebasket of "well, it seemed as a way to go then".

As for SETI, well, yes there's a lot of space research fans here and way more Star Trek and Star Wars fans, who just secretly wish aliens to exist because it would be so cool if they existed even if without a chance to get into a hot threesome with Spock and E.T, but let's face it - aliens don't exist. And if they do, hoping to get some proof from SETI is like going to the sea coast once in your life, step on the shore with closed eyes and reach into the water in hope you'll get a grasp of bottle with a message from boat wreck survivor.

If you gonna donate spare cycles, donate them on something useful instead of something cool or guilt relieving.

Re:SETI

[deroby]

Errr, yes they are !

When Folding@Home runs in the background my cpu is 100% all of the time (well, one core is in each case). When it's not running, I average around 10% I guess.
The difference is that in the latter case the cpu runs pretty much idle for 90% of the time and needs some electricity to keep going, while the former situation has it working at full throttle all the time, consuming so much more energy that the generated heat needs to be actively removed from the portable. I'm not saying it draws 10 times the amount of power, but it's going to be considerably more !

All that said, I often wonder what would be more efficient : 10.000 specialized cpu's in some server-farm / data-center churning away on a given problem, being mostly limited to that single problem and costing heaps of money and energy, or 10.000.000 versatile grid-clients that more or less produce the same output, probably eating just as much energy, if not more.

It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Nursie]

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.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[abolitiontheory]

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?

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Hairy Heron]

In my experience it's around 5 dollars a month more to run my computer all the time rather than shutting it down or putting it into hibernation at night.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Nursie]

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.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[abolitiontheory]

... 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.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Yvanhoe]

Don't see it as free, see it as a really easy way to give some money that you know will go into CPU cycles quickly and efficiently.

And to donate your company's money as well ;-)

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[analog_line]

A power strip with a switch does the job just as well as a switch on a socket. In fact, that's what I thought he meant until I read your post.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Nursie]

Err, blackle is nonsense in the modern world, IMHO.

LCD/TFT screens don't work that way. There is a bright light that's always on, and the colours and darkness come about by blocking portions of said light, not by generating more of it.

Of course, once OLED comes in that'll change again.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Waffle Iron]

What's the actual difference in energy costs, though?

I just hooked a Killawatt to my Athlon 64 X2 4800+ system. Idle, it uses 67 watts at the wall outlet. Simultaneously transcoding two videos with mencoder reads 130 watts.

If this runs 24x7, the extra 63 watts would use 1.5 KwH per day, which would cost me $71 per year with my incremental electricity cost of about 13 cents per KwH. That costs almost as much as a subscription to Netflix.

Another consideration is that when idle, the system is almost silent. Under load, both the power supply fan and CPU fan crank up and get rather loud.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[swillden]

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.

Why Fedora?

[sysusr]

If they settled for Windows, the sheer volume of available machines would far outweight any (probably minor to begin with) advantages to using Linux.

It's a bit nebulous

[Silver Sloth]

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.

Re:It's a bit nebulous

[morgan_greywolf]

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!

I have a better name ...

[Lazy Jones]

how about calling it "red computing" to remind people of how much energy it'll cost them. On modern computers, you have roughly 20-100W difference between idle/working CPUs.

Already done by others

[pwilli]

BOINC

is a client that allows you to choose out of many projects like Folding@home or SETI. The client also runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS without problems.
There are many configuration options available to control the amount of CPU-power, cores, hard-disk space, RAM, the times it runs, how it should behave is someone else is using the system, etc. and the best is, anybody could set up a project that uses the client (although you'll probably have ahard time getting people to choose your project if it isn't something very interesting).

Check it out!

Isn't just this Boinc?

[nweaver]

The Seti-at-home crowd, long ago, realized that it was more than Seti@home, thus created BOINC. So whats new here?

Has he not heard of Boinc?

[Bazman]

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

  "Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy"

  And you can do it NOW. With almost ANY computer.

He's either not done his research or he's an idiot.

Mac users can do something like this already...

[Dekortage]

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.

World Community Grid

[Luyseyal]

Personally, I prefer World Community Grid. I've been a member of the Slashdot team there since 2005 sometime.

-l

Che Fedora!

[WheresMyDingo]

Greedy capitalists, share your idle cycles! Power to the people!

Real numbers

[BLKMGK]

I use the newer 80+ rated PSUs and I don't oversize them like so many others do. My desktop machine AND a server that also has an 80+ PSU in it (and 10HDDs) together use just about 300Watts as measured by my Kill-a-Watt device. That's not an insignificant amount but that was also with all of my drives spun up - normally drives not in use goto sleep (unRAID).

The PSU ratings of those two machines together are probably somewhere right around a kilowatt and yet I use a fraction of that at full chat. My desktop has a 45nm C2D (E8400) clocked to 3.8Ghz, an 8800GTS (die shrunk too), a single HDD, multiple cooling fans.

My point is that just because a PSU is rated for something doesn't mean it's going to be using that even when you have fairly thirsty components onboard - using the rating is a bit misleading as it's a maximum output. The fact that I use highly efficient supplies helps a great deal, they don't cost much more. My power bill isn't insignificant mind you but these aren't the only two computers I run either :-)