[At-Large] A geek's way to give back (off-topic)

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Thu Dec 30 19:32:16 UTC 2010


No. In fact very little bandwidth is used, most of the processing is done
offline.

The way it works is:
- Your computer calls the research project and asks if there is work to be
done.
- One of more "tasks" are downloaded -- software and a datasets to process
- your computer's CPU processes the data, offline with no network connection
- when done, your system uploads the result data to the researchers
- repeat

The data uploaded by your PC is combined with the tasks completed by
thousands of other PCs to offer supercomputer power. It is the job of the
researchers to break their work into small pieces suitable as tasks.
I am running one task now that is only 55% done even though it has been
running for three days.

- Evan



On 30 December 2010 14:00, Sivasubramanian M <isolatedn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have computing resources to share, but if it is shared over the Internet,
> wouldn't it consume considerable bandwidth?
>
> Sivasubramanian M
>
>
> facebook: http://is.gd/x8Sh
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>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:
>
> > On 12/27/2010 09:20 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> >
> > > Some of you may be already aware of the project known as
> > > "SETI at Home<http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/>",
> > > which has been using the power of hundreds of thousands of under-used
> PCs
> > in
> > > homes and businesses worldwide...
> >
> > I used to run dozens upon dozens of machines with BOINC/setiathome...
> >
> > One thing, depending on your point of view, that is either
> > "interesting", "amusing", or "appalling" is that modern computers can
> > burn a lot more electrical power (i.e. have a greater carbon footprint)
> > when doing things like SETI computations.
> >
> > I've been running a power monitor on one of my AMD 6-core machines and
> > it goes from about 65 to 70 watts during normal use to about 125 watts
> > when it is thinking mildly hard.  I haven't pushed it really hard but I
> > anticipate that it will be well above 175 watts.  (High-end graphics
> > cards can show the same kind of changes in power consumption when they
> > are working hard.)
> >
> > I ran some tests on a laptop and BOINC/SETI made a real difference in
> > heat (the laptop got positively hot).  I'd suggest thinking twice about
> > running it on a laptop.
> >
> >                --karl--
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-- 
- Evan



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