I dare you to watch one of these video's and not join the Priuschat team! Video 1 Video 2 Priuschat Topic and how to join the team! Wildkow
NO NO NO Actually I'm trying to make one of these vids up with a Prius theme hoping the Mods will allow me to place it on the site somewhere so that we can attract some more team mates. Wildow
Since I'm a Conservative in the very literal, Old Fashioned sense (Very fiscally responsible, not flashy, very cheap, etc), I never leave my computer unattended more than 15 mins without powering down, then shutting down the UPS, so it kills all the power-wasting bricks also plugged into it Folding sounds like an interesting concept. I didn't realize that research institutes were so hard up they had to beg processor time off ordinary folks. I would just scrounge up hundreds of obsolete and free Mac's and PC's, load Linux, and set up a parallel processing cluster
I don't think they have a client (program) for that but good idea. Science is always looking for funds to further their research so not spending money on supercomputers to do the number crunching is fiscally conservative. Besides by doing it this way Stanford University has set a new world record of a petaflop in computational power for a single project. BTW you can have the client running while doing your daily work or at home while browsing, email or games because most programs only use a tiny fraction of the CPU's power. Even if you run one of the power hungry PS3 console’s 24/7, you only use 150-200 watts (the equivalent of two incandescent light bulbs) it would only cost you (last I heard) approximately 10 dollars per month. A PC is much cheaper. I run the client on my Q6600 PC, a Mac Mini, Two laptops and a PS3 and I have only noticed about a 10-15 dollar increase in my power bill. So if you only ran it 8 hours, a typical work day the cost would be 2-5 dollars, now that’s a bargain! Also the Folding@Home client has its priority set to idle. Therefore, it only uses CPU cycles that are idle and when another program demands the CPU the Folding@Home client steps aside, It's a Win-Win situation how about lending a hand to help cure some horrible diseases? Wildkow
You don't need a Cray or similar supercomputer to do work like that. A lot of recent advances in massively networked smaller machines can accomplish almost as much, at much reduced cost. Example, blade machines There is a program called Pooch that will massively network/process a large number of Mac machines. A government research client of mine is using this approach with great success Oh, I'm all for curing horrible diseases. There is a lot of work being done at universities on this front, courtesy of various MURI funding programs As far as the power per FLOP, I would much rather encourage folks to shut down their PC's when not in use. A professionally managed central processing facility will usually be more efficient and reliable
Sigh, I guess I'll have to get used to that I don't think this post attracted anyone interested in curing diseases. Wildkow
