Harvesting & Reusing Idle Computer Cycles 224
Hustler writes "More on the University of Texas grid project's mission to integrate numerous, diverse resources into a comprehensive campus cyber-infrastructure for research and education. This article examines the idea of harvesting unused cycles from compute resources to provide this aggregate power for compute-intensive work."
Play fair on the resources (Score:4, Insightful)
Google's desktop search is one example where the timing and recovery back to the user is really done well.
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Sure about that? (Score:4, Insightful)
REusing idle cycles? Really?
Re:electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Electricity vs cost of more machines and labor (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very insightful post, but has two crucial counterarguments
Re:electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
The next question is - who pays for the electricity then? University departments are notorious for sqabbling over who picks up the tab for a shared resource - and that's not even considering the wider inclusion of home users...
Re:electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I do, the same for RAM being accessed and for a hard disk drive when it's seeking. But this is insignificant compared to the overhead of the power supply, fans, hard disk drive spindle motors, other circuitry that runs continuously, and dare I mention all those fancy-dancy computer case lights that are popular now.
The incremental cost of these otherwise-unused cycles is so low that they can be considered free.
So someone prove me wrong, what's the electricity cost of running a CPU at full cycles for a year vs. running at typical load? What's the cost of the lowered processor life due to running at a higher temperature. Chip makers will tell you this is a real cost, but practically, the machine is likely to be replaced with the next generation before the processor has a heat-related problem.
Regardless, the cost is MUCH lower, in both electricity and capital, than buying other machines specifically to do the work assigned to these 'free cycles'.
Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
But case in point: My Athlon64 computer doubles its wallplug powerdraw (including everything:PSU, Mainboard, HD, ect) at 100% load compared to idle desktop (ok, cool%quite helps pushing idle power down).
The cpu IS the biggest chunck besides some high-end GPUs (and even those need MUCH less power when idle), and modern cpus need 3-4 times as much power under full load compared to idle.
Don't invent your own mouse trap (Score:5, Insightful)
PVM [ornl.gov] offers both the spec and the implementation, MPI [anl.gov] offers a newer spec with several solid implementations. But no, NIH-syndrom [wikipedia.org] prevails and another piece of half-baked software is born.
Where I work, the monstrosity uses Java RMI to pass the input data and computation results around -- encapsulated in XML, no less...
It is very hard to fight -- I did a comparision implementing the same task in PVM and in our own software. Depending on the weight of the individual computation being distributed, PVM was from 10 to 300% faster and used 5 times less bandwidth. Upper management saw the white paper...
Guess, what we continue to develop and push to our clients?
Re:GridMP is a commercial distributed computing im (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
This has political ramifications.
The goal: get a great, powerful, cluster of compute power.
You can't go to the administration and say, "We need to spend $150k on a compute cluster". The answer will be "we don't have one now, and everything's just fine. No."
So, you, being resourceful, implement this campus-wide cluster system that taps spare resources. Power bills go up a bit - nobody cares.
Now, a couple years later, lots of projects are using the cluster. But the thing isn't working well because the power's not there during normal peak usage.
At his point you go the administration, "we're losing tuition-paying students, and several grants are at risk because our compute cluster is not powerful enough. We need to spend $250k on a new compute cluster.
And THAT is how you manipulate your operations budget to augment your capital budget.
Re:Reused??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Suffice to say however AMD calculates it's PR rating really doesn't change the fact that it's to provide a comparison between Athlons and P4. I can guarrantee you if intel released a P4 processor that changed that correlation, AMD would change their PR rating on new processor to match it. Of course now that Intel itself is going to a PR rating of sorts that all changes.
Re:electricity (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:CPU power consumption (Score:5, Insightful)
If you wanted to get that computing power in a stand alone system, you'd not only have to purchase the PC (up front capital), but you'd have to pay more for electricity. From the reference link, only about 30% of a computer's power is used by the CPU, the rest is doing nothin'. The computers referenced, at full bore use 185W (best case). That's $162 per year at my 10 cent per kilowatt hour quote. Cheaper, sure, but by the cost of a computer? Not even close.
Of course, there are other (hidden) costs involved in both methods, of which I'm not including in my (overly?) simplified model. And I'll just brush under the rug the fact that this kinda assumes that the average secretary has a top of the line system to surf the web with.
Re:Electricity vs cost of more machines and labor (Score:2, Insightful)
Wisconsin Condor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:laptop cores are much better (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean like a thermostat?
Re:Electricity vs cost of more machines and labor (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I ran the SETI@home client and the Golomb ruler client for a while, but stopped because of a variety of factors:
I think if grid computing is ever going to take off, it needs to become a capitalist enterprise. If someone would pay me a few bucks a day for my spare cycles, and the client was open-source, and there was close to zero hassle, I'd gladly do it. Remember, one of the good things about a free market is that it tends to be an efficient way to allocate resources.
Re:Don't invent your own mouse trap (Score:2, Insightful)
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Do read the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Your cluster - is it so fast that you're never stuck waiting for jobs to finish? If not, then you could probably benefit from being able to borrow time on someone's larger system. Is your cluster so well-utilized that the load's always around 1? If not then you've probably got spare capacity that someone else could benefit from. The fact that both you and those others are using MPI is necessary but insufficient to allow you to cooperate.