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.
Harvesting and Reusing Idle Compute Cycles
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Eugenia Loli
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I supported the Folding@home project for a long time, recruited thousands of folks and what did I find out?
That Stanford and Berkley have more than enough processors and can’t keep enough work units up. Stanford sells the unused processors by using different work units and Berkley just sends out duplicates.
Stanford is growing mice with human brains, pigs with human blood and all sorts of fun stuff, plus it’s like they are in a continous state of begging. They rather wait a few years and beg someone to optimize code or write a app for them instead of paying a programmer a decent salary and immediatly reap the rewards of optimized code running on millions of machines.
Dig a little deeper before you commit your precious CPU cycles and elevated electric bill every month. Most likely your being used.
I rather see a list of verifiable projects in my System preferences with a nice dollar reward for each 100% CPU hour contributed.
Free is out, I gave enough already just to find out I was used.
Actually this project mentioned in the article is a lot like Apple’s X-Grid, which you install the application on a bunch of networked Macs and one acts as the administrator.
You plug in a job that can be split up amonst all the nodes and let her rip.
You get a piece of eye-candy spedometer that shows your total Ghz etc.
Since X-grid can be used online, you can watch as more nodes hook up and the Ghz increases.
I’m surprised someone like NASA hasn’t come up with a Distributed Computing Project that searches the skies/heavens for asteroids and other such objects which may have a collision course with Earth.
Asteroids@Home, perhaps?
— “I’m surprised someone like NASA hasn’t come up with a Distributed Computing Project that searches the skies/heavens for asteroids and other such objects which may have a collision course with Earth.”
But how would distributed computing help with that? The calculations to determine wether an asteroid will come anywhere near us are very simple, its observatories actually looking around the sky that are in short supply. Its not like with SETI where they have to do intensive signal processing or anything.
Not to mention the useless and unfounded alarmism that such a project could create.
It would be better to turn all those computers off or put them into deep sleep / standby.
All the grid computing so far has produced nothing of value.
The power savings would cut down pollution, save our natural resources, keep the environment in better shape, and cut down the amount of radiation that people are exposed to.
All the grid computing so far has produced nothing of value.
Did you have some meat to back this up, or is it just a troll?
What are you talking about?
Many areas of research require intensive computer models to be run. It’s obviously cheaper to use distributed computing than to rent or build your own hardware.
All that grid is what
* powers your polluting SUV (because oil and gas reservoir
simulation & seismic processing is done using grids)
* calculates whether you are elligible for a loan
* calculates the risk that your financial portfolio carries
* provides input to understanding of cancer
* and much more.
-CEO
“Not to mention the useless and unfounded alarmism that such a project could create.”
Like we don’t already have that already? What about the WHEEL.. OF.. TERROR! color system and the earthquake predictor color map/chart we have now, we have plenty of these public warning systems, an Asteroids@Home distributed computing project would be useful, IMO, and I don’t feel enough people in the Joe Sixpack public would ever hear about it or even grasp the concept of it anyway. If they did hear about it they’d probably just compare the idea to an episode of The Simpsons or something stupid like that, then down a beer, and return to their dreary life of celebrity worship.
— “I’m surprised someone like NASA hasn’t come up with a Distributed Computing Project that searches the skies/heavens for asteroids and other such objects which may have a collision course with Earth.”
The following websites will be helpful in giving an example of how grid computing is currently used:
http://www.ggf.org/
http://www.gridcomputing.com/
http://www.gridtoday.com/gridtoday.html
http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/
…………………I hope this helps