How Do I Put Unused Servers To Work?

olyar writes "I worked for an internet start-up last year and during the 'we have plenty of money' phase, a lot of server hardware was purchased. Eight months later, there is very little money, but we're still plugging along — using only a fraction of the hardware. We just cleared out a co-lo and I now have a stack of 17, 1U servers in my garage. Each of those has 2 servers, each of which is a 2-processor, dual-core box with 8 GB of RAM. Add that up and I have 136 processors and 272 GB of RAM with nothing to do. The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS. The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well. So I've been brainstorming ways to put all of that power to good use. Any ideas?"

Comments

Self-employment

[David E. Smith]

Start competing with your employer. If they can afford to do whatever it is they do, and still just give away thousands of dollars in gear, there's obviously room for improvement.

Donate them.

[cbiltcliffe]

Donate them to Pirate Bay. If nothing else, it will help them with the streaming video for their trial. :)
Or, you could run Crysis in software rendering mode.
Or rent it out to spammers, crackers, etc.

Seriously, though....you could probably rent out time on it to researchers for less than most supercomputer time costs. Especially since the hardware costs you nothing. All you have to pay for is power. Figure out how much it uses running full tilt, double or triple that cost, install Linux on the thing, and rent out CPU time.

Maybe you could even be part of the next big breakthrough in security research.

Re:Donate to At Home Projects

[KibibyteBrain]

Even if he tried to do something profitable using them, between paying for power and bandwidth to operate them, it would have to be a real business model to even expect to break even in the modern economy of cheap professional server hosts. If there is a local university by you, I'd advertise trying to donate it to a local college or University with engineering/computer science programs. Often students just need academic clusters for the experience of parallel programming problems, and of course it could even help in minor actually useful research. And I'm sure they could help you work out a way to get some sort of tax recognition for the donation.

Re:Beowult

[TheRaven64]

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank whoever coined the word 'Beowulf' as a very convenient shorthand form of 'I don't know anything about cluster computing, please disregard my opinion.' I can't begin to imagine how much time this has saved people over the years.