Berkeley has this really cool program called BOINC that you can download and donate your computer’s resources to processing scientific data. There are a bunch of projects to pick, from working on climate change, to cancer, to the Large Hadron Collider.
The good folks at linuxserver.io even have a ready to go Docker container for easy setup: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/boinc
Another possibility is running the Archive Team’s Warrior, which downloads data from at risk web sites and uploads them to the Internet Archive: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Does anyone else have examples of projects like this? My dream is for the Fediverse to have this sort of feature eventually.
I have spare compute power yea. But not spare money for a larger electrical bill.
“Spare” cpu cycles are not free
Eh, in summer my solar panels are shitting out so much energy that most things beneath 8kW power are basically free during the day. And I can only drive the car so much and use the A/C before I’m forced to almost donate it to the electricity company for 0.07€/kWh. Might as well turn it into cycles.
May I ask, how much it costed the solar panels installation?
About 1500€/kWp. If I calculate that everything explodes right after the extended warranty has run out, it’ll be about 0.13€ per kWh generated. I don’t think this will happen if course, but at 0.37€ per kWh from the grid it was a no-brainer with that as an upper limit for the energy price.
Component lifetime is also reduced if you run them at full power (and thus max temperature) all the time.
Yeah, currently it is bad time for computing power donations.
What do you mean by “spare”? Modern CPUs scale their electricity usage according to utilisation.
One would assume they mean sitting around, doing nothing. Some would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.
That makes sense. Thank you.
would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.
That’s not “spare” though. That’s my point.
I mean yeah, but no. It is spare capacity, so it’s spare in one way.
I have hundreds of gigaflops of computing power sitting idle 80% of the time, I just don’t think the taxpayers would appreciate the power bill if I put it all to use like that. But at home I can spare a few cycles on my solar power sipping Proxmox cluster.
I have a spare room in my house sat idle 80% of the time. I could easily install a few racks of servers in there and have some gigaflops of computing power to contribute.
But actually, being “idle” isn’t the same thing as “spare” because it would cost a lot of money to install racks of servers, just as it costs money to run computations on an otherwise idle computer.
So I mean no, but no. It’s only spare capacity in a stupid, convoluted way that’s disconnected from common sense and common usage of the word.
But you managed to brag about having hundreds of gigaflops of taxpayer-funded computing at your fingertips so good for you, you go for that validation from strangers on the Internet.
Idle computing capacity that installed, online, but is not being used all the time is exactly what I thought the OP was talking about and calling spare. They said computing power to spare, not space or equipment. I don’t understand your argument about installing equipment, that to me isn’t what OP was talking about. 🤷♀️ Kinda like the spare capacity that CompuServe had from their time sharing service that they used to bring their online service to the masses at night.
Sorry you didn’t appreciate my reply. I was trying to explain my point with real examples from my experience. I don’t need your validation. I kinda regret trying to make you see both sides now. But whatever, you do you.
I use a VPS. They don’t charge based on CPU utilization so I run Folding@Home on it.
Please only do this on plans with a dedicated vCPU that isn’t shared with other users.
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For now, until economics catches up with you :-) Enjoy it while it lasts I suppose.
I’ve participated in their SETI and cancer research projects in the past. It’s a good cause, and I don’t mind making a donation.
I did think the BOINC project was shut down, though. Good to know it’s still going.
My very cursory understanding is that SETI was shutting down, but BOINC (so folding etc) should still be going.
That’s really good to know. Thanks!
Now I know this is being done with encryption, but an open tunnel direct to your non dmz-ed system, is just begging to be hacked, and it will be, without a shadow of doubt.
In what sense is this “opening a direct tunnel?”
I don’t think you really understand what’s going on here; or otherwise, I don’t.
I’ve used BOINC without issue for over a decade.
As far as I know, the BOINC client just pulls down new data for processing when each batch of work is done. There’s no pushing and no open tunnel or port. The software risk would be malicious code in a particular project (e.g. if it said it was folding proteins but actually mined bitcoins). I hope there’s some vetting of project code.
The other risk is hardware (especially CPU and RAM) running its lifetime down more quickly because of the continual heavier usage.
