Several months ago I did some raw calculations regarding power costs and my perceived benefits of adding another computer. My conclusion was that I could retire a couple of the older computers and buy a newer Intel I7 setup and still use less electricity and get more computing. I bought a P3 "kill a watt" power measurement device, measured each computers power draw and then decided which units to retire. The result was more processing power and about the same electricity use. So this is one path you might consider. John (OS/2 Warp Team)

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Another oldie is:

Tiny Linux PC uses just 8 watts of power, can be solar powered – The Aleutia E1

I'm sure there'll be other articles that are more recent...


My concern about going solar-electric is that to use photovoltaic cells is still horribly inefficient and costly. There's more immediately effective ways to go 'green'.

Happy cool crunchin',
Martin

Without trying too hard, one can get a 1.6 GHz atom at 16 watts, with a 2.5" 7200 RPM hard drive. I mentioned the Nvidia ION motherboard chipset motherboards on another thread because they support CUDA and should be able to spit out GPU work pretty fast.

So, let's assume that the ION doubles the draw, and round to 30w.

24 hours of crunching (30w is 2.5 amps at 12v, or 2.5 amps/hour, a 60 amp hour battery would run 24 hours).

I found 135 amp-hour batteries on eBay for $150 -- these are AGM-type, so they're safe indoors, no special handling or venting.

A single 200 watt panel ($500 if you shop) should pump out 10 amps while the sun is up -- about 14 hours of sunshine (two days) to fully charge the battery, but you aren't drawing the battery capacity, you're running about half.

A little bigger panel (or two slightly smaller panels) might be nice, particularly if there is no sun. You need a charge controller to match the battery to the panel, and maybe something to get from 12v to 19v for the ION.

... and you're crunching 24/7 with no power from the grid at all.

The power system would set you back about $800, if I'm not too far off on the engineering.

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... Not to bash on those who choose to go the extra mile, but the project never expected anyone to build entire farms and shoulder more responsibility (power consumption) than anyone else.

The entire point of Distributed Computing is that it is done by spare CPU cycles around the world, meaning when the computer is powered on doing other things but not using all of its CPU cycles. Turning off your computer when you are done, or when its hot out, or when you go on vacation - its all the same.

This is a down-side to the natural competitiveness that many people have; their yearning to reach the top and collect points and be number 1. In this game, it costs real money to do that. Congrats to those who can. The rest of us have a budget and other problems, especially in this economic troubling time.

Well put, Ozzfan!

I can vouch for your last paragraph. Quite often, our competitive nature turns a hobby into something that feels like a job... A difficult job that takes over too much of our life.

Bob

Out here in Arizona, we have another option as well.

Wind.

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Out here in Arizona, we have another option as well.

Wind.

Could that be the beans you had for supper? ;-P

F.

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Out here in Arizona, we have another option as well.

Wind.

We generally have a nice breeze here, but we also have neighbors close by that would object to a large whirling contraption in their ocean view.

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you could put them into sleep during the day and run at night when rates are lower.

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I recommend Secunia PSI: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/
Go Georgia Tech.

Hello RottenMutt,

shut down some of your rigs to cut your energy bill (especially the Cuda ones).

We need you here to find ET and there is no need to be in the Top list of crunchers in my opinion.

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Am Ende ist nur Verwirrung

The other way is to plan your crunching around the electricity budget. I have a fixed kwh budget every month (to avoid punitive tariff) and plan my crunching so that together with my other use, will hit about 90% of that. Nonetheless, s@h always run on my main driver, as many suggested, even during the catch-up weeks when practically every other crunching machine gets turned off

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It looks like there are a few of us.After getting a killawatt I decided to shut down my pent-d, take off the h2o cooling on my quad and run at default.my RAC has dropped from 12000 to just under 3000, of course no APs has added to the drop. i'm running other projects so total rac is ok,also only running about ten hours a day. After about six weeks now it doesn't feel so bad. youv'e got to have a daily driver so keep on crunchen.I got to around 80 in top hosts,and will still hit 3000000, it'll just take a little longer. Best to all. Solar and wind sound good if I could have a 2kw nuke in the basement!!!!!!!!!

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do you have any suggestion what way i should go i want to do the same.

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Hi Rottenmutt, why don't you do what I've done? When I received my power bill in March for the 1st quarter 09, I really thought I'd received an electric shock :) £1,310.00 - that's over £400 per month.

I'm still crunching, but my TC has gone from approx 25/30k per day to around 5/6k per day.

I now shut down all rigs (reconfigured home server to back up all rigs during the day) around midnight & back on whenever I wake up.

Received 2nd quarter bill & now £312.76, a fair bit higher than normal but a hell of a lot less than the previous one, so will leave 2 switched off at weekends.

If/When things get better, then all 12 back online 24/7.

It'll be a shame to totally lose a regular such as yourself.

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To RottenMutt and others considering dismantling their farms:


Consider keeping the most efficient systems running (generally the newer systems, but you can run the numbers). This way you can maximize WU/$.

The energy costs are not going up immediately. You could wait a little bit.

Any systems that you are not going to keep using, consider donating to a local school or library. This might also get you a great tax deduction.

Even better: see if they will let you leave BOINC installed on the machine after they take it. That might get a couple of kids interested in radio astronomy or technical computing.

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Yeah, I've shut down my slowest beast, which is too bad because it has been alive and kicking for about a decade and for seti and einstein about 4 years. I hope to see a negative blip on our electrical use, but there is so much variation in that that I doubt I will notice anything. Perhaps I'll restart it in the fall if I get nostalgic.

However, it is dumb to donate old crap to non-profits for tax purposes. First, the value of old crap is effectively zero. So if you take more than zero off your taxes, you are defrauding the government. Isn't the current government officials in DC doing that enought? Second, the overhead of using old crap is relatively high. So the effect is to reduce the productivity of our already unproductive public schools. Finally, what kid today wants to see an ISA bus or Windows 2000?? Really, they have better gadgets to play with. I say use garage sales, Craigslist, or the neighbor's dumpster to get rid of the venerable old crap (just like our soon to be enacted government health system will do to each of us).

Hi, so far, I'll turned down OC's and my Pentium 4D(820), runs very hot,85%, is turned back to 60%, for now, at least ,

When this heat is over, probably tomorrow, I do hope so for a while, then a resume as before or better ;-).

Outside it's still 29C, inside 25.5C,AC=ON, humidity >80%(rel.)

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electricity and cable are included here. i wish i had more cash for faster more abundant computers.

The original purpose of SETIathome was to capture unused CPU cycles. In effect, getting something out of nothing. Over the years it has turned into a "sport" seeing who could out-compute everyone else.

If you run SETIathome as it was originally intended, it will cost you nothing.

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The original purpose of SETIathome was to capture unused CPU cycles. In effect, getting something out of nothing. Over the years it has turned into a "sport" seeing who could out-compute everyone else.

If you run SETIathome as it was originally intended, it will cost you nothing.

not true any more, all my rigs double the power consumed while crunching seti compared to idle. 10 years ago it was a different story.

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And I used to need and have only one average PC to play and surf the net. Now that I have a bunch of high tech computers filled with expensive videocards just for crunching, what can I say about spare cicles.......its all about SETI crunch for some maniacs out there.

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My wife is a graduate student working on molecular modeling for HIV. So when she isn't using her computers, I sneak into the office and run BOINC. She keeps the computers running all the time, so why not use those extra cycles? Where I am located, most of our electricity comes from nuclear, so its still relatively cheap.

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