"Nightlife" Harnesses Idle Fedora Nodes For Research

A. B. VerHausen writes "If you've given up on SETI, now you can let your idle computer help with other kinds of scientific research. Red Hat employee Bryan Che started a project called Nightlife. He wants people to 'donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power.'" Che hopes to have more than a million Fedora nodes running as part of this project.

SETI

[pryoplasm (809342)]

There is also folding at home http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu] that might help someones life more than software ever will.

I am all for open source, but there are some better places to donate some spare cpu cycles

Re:SETI

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Not to mention climate change prediction at home via climateprediction.net [climateprediction.net].

Re:SETI

[mwvdlee (775178)]

I guess that's irony; letting your computer consume large quantities of environmentally unfriendly produced electricity in order to calculate climate change.

Re:SETI

[somersault (912633)]

It's better to think of it as job security.

Re:SETI

[deroby (568773)]

Errr, yes they are !

When Folding@Home runs in the background my cpu is 100% all of the time (well, one core is in each case). When it's not running, I average around 10% I guess.
The difference is that in the latter case the cpu runs pretty much idle for 90% of the time and needs some electricity to keep going, while the former situation has it working at full throttle all the time, consuming so much more energy that the generated heat needs to be actively removed from the portable. I'm not saying it draws 10 times the amount of power, but it's going to be considerably more !

All that said, I often wonder what would be more efficient : 10.000 specialized cpu's in some server-farm / data-center churning away on a given problem, being mostly limited to that single problem and costing heaps of money and energy, or 10.000.000 versatile grid-clients that more or less produce the same output, probably eating just as much energy, if not more.

Re:SETI

[Krigl (1025293)]

I'd personally still prefer Folding@Home - climatology is way too complex, with lots of unexplained and speculative stuff. I'm not a scientist, but I'd guess this needs more basic research of underlying principles before brute force number crunching starts yielding useful results (any climatologist here?), not mentioning this project screams "junk science" out loud. And if they want internet community to get interested maybe someone should enlighten them about possibilities of different picture formats than 22 MB .bmp for high resolution histogram of global temperature change [climateprediction.net].

Folding@Home is useful and brings actual results - you'll get a chance to throw your own pack of frozen pea against Africa's hunger, instead throwing it into wastebasket of "well, it seemed as a way to go then".

As for SETI, well, yes there's a lot of space research fans here and way more Star Trek and Star Wars fans, who just secretly wish aliens to exist because it would be so cool if they existed even if without a chance to get into a hot threesome with Spock and E.T, but let's face it - aliens don't exist. And if they do, hoping to get some proof from SETI is like going to the sea coast once in your life, step on the shore with closed eyes and reach into the water in hope you'll get a grasp of bottle with a message from boat wreck survivor.

If you gonna donate spare cycles, donate them on something useful instead of something cool or guilt relieving.

Re:

[bWareiWare.co.uk (660144)]

You realise folding at home is software right?

Re:

[an.echte.trilingue (1063180)]

I thought the most interesting part of this is that he thinks he can get a million people to do this.

Fedora is mostly a hobbyist OS (as opposed to RHEL), and I bet a lot of Fedora machines are desktops. If that number is at all realistic, the number of Linux users worldwide is way underestimated.

Re:

[Danathar (267989)]

If you don't know what the guy is talking about, then don't comment.

Condor is WAY different than BOINC or Folding@home.

BOINC is middleware but NOT general purpose grid computing. Condor is a distributed batch oriented system that allows people to submitt jobs and get them done. You can configure BOINC to run as backfill to Condor when Condor is not being used.

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

unsolved protein mysteries

You mean like the chicken and the egg debate? Why pot noodles are so addictive? Or how that mouldy block of cheese managed to solve the game of solitaire that you'd left lying out on the kitchen table?

Re:SETI

[somersault (912633)]

Nightlife is usually what you do before you boink.

It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Nursie (632944)]

It's the not-so-idle electricty bill that'll turn up when I let people use my PC's spare cycles all the time.

That's why it's off, in stand by or auto throttling the processor. That's why letting people use your "idle" cycles is not as simple a charitable proposition as it sounds.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[abolitiontheory (1138999)]

What's the actual difference in energy costs, though? Not saying you're stupid or selfish for not donating, just interested in the real figures, if you've got any. I throw my system into hibernation most nights, and try to turn off the monitor at least when I go away for a couple hours during the day. What have you found your general savings to be?

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Hairy Heron (1296923)]

In my experience it's around 5 dollars a month more to run my computer all the time rather than shutting it down or putting it into hibernation at night.

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

Presumably it was just idling when you left it on overnight though - what would the costs be if it was run flat out all the time? I leave my PS3 running folding@home all the time, I'm not too fussed about the extra cost - have done over 100 units now after having it for just over a month. If it were in my bedroom rather than the living room then I'd probably switch it off in the evenings because of the fan noise (it's not bad, but it's not silent either).

Re:

[Nursie (632944)]

Real figures?

I don't know, but given that people have PSUs rated from 250W - 1KW these days, I would have thought fairly significant, assuming a pretty high utilisation of "spare" cycles.

I know we've managed to cut our electricity bill in half lately by moving to energy saving bulbs and making sure we actually switch stuff off at the socket when it's not in use.

Also, there's that whole "not using more than you need" thing to do with electricity having to come from somewhere, and that simewhere usually bein

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[abolitiontheory (1138999)]

... making sure we actually switch stuff off at the socket ...

I keep trying to think of a funny and poignant way to point out that we Americans don't have the slightest notion of this concept, because its not built into to our electrical system. I'm sure you could get switches at the sockets if you intentionally looked for them, but I was 21 before I ever knew of this concept, from going over to England to visit family. It's one of those small details that sticks in your head, kind of like slang words or Cadbury chocolate. American chocolate is rubbish.

Re:

[Nursie (632944)]

Come to think of it, you're right, I haven't noticed power switches on power sockets whenever I've been in the US (quite a lot over the years). Guess you don't notice the absence of little things like that.

Ghirardelli do an ok bit of chocolate. OTOH, Hersheys is like some sort of brown soap.

Actually unplugging everything would be more hassle, having the switch right there on the socket is a good thing, IMHO. I'm not obsessive about this and have a home server and a router that are UPS'd and on all the time.

Re:

[analog_line (465182)]

A power strip with a switch does the job just as well as a switch on a socket. In fact, that's what I thought he meant until I read your post.

Re:

[Nursie (632944)]

I'm sure I've seen them in other places...

Maybe Singapore (OK, so they use british standard sockets).... Hmmm.

Re:

[farmerj (566229)]

Yep the Irish power sockets are the same as the British ones. A lot of our fittings and standards are based on the British ones.

The main exception I can think of offhand is the phone sockets, the British ones use a BT socket [wikipedia.org], while the Irish ones use a RJ11 socket [wikipedia.org].

In the past this has caused a wee bit of consternation, as many retailers that service both the UK and Ireland sold phones with BT sockets in Ireland, leading to many WTFs as people tried to connect them :-)

Re:Switched Outlets For a Switch

[FurtiveGlancer (1274746)]

Allow me to add Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Italy and Germany to the list of places where switched outlets are used. I've seen the switches primarily on high current outlets for major appliances, such as washers and dryers.

I'd postulate that the switch at EVERY outlet in the UK may be related to WW II air raids and blackouts.

Re:

[ozbird (127571)]

Actually, no-one other than the British do, AFAIK.

Australia has switched wall outlets; New Zealand shares the same plug/socket format, so they probably do too. It might have something to do with having 240V mains power (vs. 110V) and/or more stringent safety regulations e.g. we have earth pins on all outlets too.

Real numbers

[BLKMGK (34057)]

I use the newer 80+ rated PSUs and I don't oversize them like so many others do. My desktop machine AND a server that also has an 80+ PSU in it (and 10HDDs) together use just about 300Watts as measured by my Kill-a-Watt device. That's not an insignificant amount but that was also with all of my drives spun up - normally drives not in use goto sleep (unRAID).

The PSU ratings of those two machines together are probably somewhere right around a kilowatt and yet I use a fraction of that at full chat. My desktop

Re:

[Idbar (1034346)]

Well, as you can use your CPU cycles to help research, I guess you can also help by not wasting energy too. Both are common efforts and achieve better results as more people join. If blackle [blackle.com] has any numbers that only by changing the background (I have all my windows with dark background anyways, just because I don't get so tired of my eyes at the end of the day), you can help. I think, that as a common effort to achieve different goals, you are free to chose either one, independently on how much it cost to

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Nursie (632944)]

Err, blackle is nonsense in the modern world, IMHO.

LCD/TFT screens don't work that way. There is a bright light that's always on, and the colours and darkness come about by blocking portions of said light, not by generating more of it.

Of course, once OLED comes in that'll change again.

Re:

[Idbar (1034346)]

Yes I was just setting an example. There are several places I know they still use CRTs, and I'd guess in that case it makes a little sense to use black. But if by turning your computer off, you are completely avoiding consumption, then makes much more sense, than any pseudo-screensaver.

Re:

[lubricated (49106)]

I've wondered about this. If the light is always on and you need electricity to not let part of it through then white should in theory waste less power than black. Also setting your backlight lower during the screensaver would help too.

Re:

[nine-times (778537)]

Also setting your backlight lower during the screensaver would help too.

Or turning your screen off (or "power saving mode") instead of going to screensaver. Screensavers also don't make a ton of sense in the modern world. Burn-in is much less of a problem on modern monitors, and computers can power down the screen instead of going to screensaver.

In truth, I still use a screensaver as a sort of warning system. The screensaver comes on 3 minutes before the computer sleeps, so if I want to keep it from sleeping, I have a couple minutes to stop it. But if you're using some k

Re:LCD/TFT Screens Don't Work That Way

[FurtiveGlancer (1274746)]

Fpanels turn off the backlight after a period of inactivity, typically 15 minutes. They must to earn an energy star symbol.

Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

What's the actual difference in energy costs, though?

I just hooked a Killawatt to my Athlon 64 X2 4800+ system. Idle, it uses 67 watts at the wall outlet. Simultaneously transcoding two videos with mencoder reads 130 watts.

If this runs 24x7, the extra 63 watts would use 1.5 KwH per day, which would cost me $71 per year with my incremental electricity cost of about 13 cents per KwH. That costs almost as much as a subscription to Netflix.

Another consideration is that when idle, the system is almost silent. Under load, both the power supply fan and CPU fan crank up and get rather loud.

Actual energy costs

[jgoemat (565882)]

What's the actual difference in energy costs, though? Not saying you're stupid or selfish for not donating, just interested in the real figures, if you've got any. I throw my system into hibernation most nights, and try to turn off the monitor at least when I go away for a couple hours during the day. What have you found your general savings to be?

A modern dual core processor can use about an extra 100 watts of energy when processing than when idle. This is from using a watt meter on a few computers of

Re:

[Yvanhoe (564877)]

Don't see it as free, see it as a really easy way to give some money that you know will go into CPU cycles quickly and efficiently.

And to donate your company's money as well ;-)

Re:

[shawn(at)fsu (447153)]

not as simple a charitable proposition as it sounds.
Would the fact that it's costing you more money than you thought make it more charitable?

Why Fedora?

[sysusr (971503)]

If they settled for Windows, the sheer volume of available machines would far outweight any (probably minor to begin with) advantages to using Linux.

It's a bit nebulous

[Silver Sloth (770927)]

Err... I've read TFA and all I can see is that some guy would like to use spare Fedora cpu cycles for some sort of project but he doesn't know what and he's not really sure how. My immediate response is come back when you've got something concrete.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Err... I've read TFA and all I can see is that some guy would like to use spare Fedora cpu cycles for some sort of project but he doesn't know what and he's not really sure how. My immediate response is come back when you've got something concrete

Hmph. Sounds just like a PHB when they propose a new development project. "Well, see, we want to use [ SAP | Lotus Notes | Teamcenter | other complex technology here ], but we're not really sure how we'd use it. For fsck's sake, if you don't already know HOW yo

I have a better name ...

[Lazy Jones (8403)]

how about calling it "red computing" to remind people of how much energy it'll cost them. On modern computers, you have roughly 20-100W difference between idle/working CPUs.

Re:

[Ngarrang (1023425)]

If we would just build more power plants, this wouldn't be a problem. I need more power for my cluster, anywho. And, if I ever complete my cluster powered by 1000 Mini-ITX boards, watch out world!

Bwuhahahahahahaha!

(This message has been brought to by Pave The Planet.)

Re:

[Lazy Jones (8403)]

That's the right way really... build more power plants (preferably solar power plants), then if there is spare energy at peak production times, we may use it to trigger some grid computing by otherwise idle processors. Nothing wasted that way...

Already done by others

[pwilli (1102893)]

BOINC [berkeley.edu]

is a client that allows you to choose out of many projects like Folding@home or SETI. The client also runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS without problems.
There are many configuration options available to control the amount of CPU-power, cores, hard-disk space, RAM, the times it runs, how it should behave is someone else is using the system, etc. and the best is, anybody could set up a project that uses the client (although you'll probably have ahard time getting people to choose your project if it isn't something very interesting).

Check it out!

Isn't just this Boinc?

[nweaver (113078)]

The Seti-at-home crowd, long ago, realized that it was more than Seti@home, thus created BOINC [berkeley.edu]. So whats new here?

Has he not heard of Boinc?

[Bazman (4849)]

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu]

  "Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy"

  And you can do it NOW. With almost ANY computer.

He's either not done his research or he's an idiot.

Re:

[Bazman (4849)]

As easy as 'apt-get install boinc'? Or you can click things in synaptic. Ubuntu ftw again.

Mac users can do something like this already...

[Dekortage (697532)]

Since Mac OS 10.4 and later come with Xgrid [apple.com] already installed, it's very easy for your spare processor cycles to be donated to science [macresearch.org]. A few clicks in your System Preferences, and you're done.

World Community Grid

[Luyseyal (3154)]

Personally, I prefer World Community Grid [worldcommunitygrid.org]. I've been a member of the Slashdot team there since 2005 sometime.

-l

Re:

[H0p313ss (811249)]

Cound not find info about system requirements (platforms)

Boinc [berkeley.edu] is the current client, requirements are here [berkeley.edu].

Che Fedora!

[WheresMyDingo (659258)]

Greedy capitalists, share your idle cycles! Power to the people!

Re:

[simong (32944)]

There isn't the computing power in the world for that...

Re:

[H0p313ss (811249)]

I love Nightlife...I love to boogie.

boogie woogie?