Home › Forums › Open Discussion › Grid Computing – Pros?/Cons?
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September 30, 2010 at 6:15 am #596531
FenceMemberI happened across “Grid Computing” and it’s new to me but may be old news to someone else. In any case, I think this fits into my goal of volunteering while doing virtually nothing while my computer does something virtually.
Can it be? Can I feel good about myself for signing up?
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewGridComputingBasics.do
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
I’m a naturally suspicious person so I’m skeptical. Does anyone know more about this?
September 30, 2010 at 6:51 am #704666
christopherboffoliParticipantFence: There is little to be suspicious about. For years people have been donating time on their computers during down hours to help all kinds of research. It is a really good thing.
September 30, 2010 at 12:46 pm #704667
FenceMemberNeat! Thanks, christopherboffoli.
September 30, 2010 at 12:57 pm #704668
KenParticipantThe only thing to worry about afik is power consumption. I knew a guy in the salvage business that set up 50+ sparq 20’s in the 90’s to use for seti@home. He had to take them down when his power bill exceeded the value of the computers.
Sparq 20s are real power pigs compared to current systems though.
I use a rack of servers to heat my garage in winter. I had to retire the sparqs and the pentium D’s due to power usage a few years ago.
Core2 with sata drives run much less power in use and when idle. Atom cpus run on even less.
September 30, 2010 at 2:09 pm #704669
BigPhilParticipantIndeed, folding@home and seti@home are noble pursuits.. even if the likelhiood of either returning anything valuable asymptotically approaches 0..
September 30, 2010 at 3:53 pm #704670
wsgolferMember@Ken, did you mean Sparc 20s? From Sun? Those were amazingly well put-together machines for their time, but were indeed power hogs. I administered a few labs with around 60 of them back in my university days, and the section of the lab they were in was always several degrees warmer than the rest of the lab :).
September 30, 2010 at 4:39 pm #704671
KenParticipantyeah. my spell checker didn’t like either spelling so I left it alone even though it looked odd. It has been a long time and I was low on coffee :)
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