Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Red Hat Software Businesses Science

"Nightlife" Harnesses Idle Fedora Nodes For Research 171

Posted by timothy from the deserves-an-award-for-the-name-alone dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

"Nightlife" Harnesses Idle Fedora Nodes For Research More

"Nightlife" Harnesses Idle Fedora Nodes For Research

Comments Filter:

  • SETI (Score:5, Informative)

    by pryoplasm ( 809342 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:42AM (#23584793)
    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 (Score:1)

      by abolitiontheory ( 1138999 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:55AM (#23584917)
      Agreed here. I don't have much hope in the mission of SETI, but Folding@Home's research is basically like throwing a gigantic brute force attack at unsolved protein mysteries. It feels like hacking, in a way. I love that idea, instead of just processing bombarded information from outer space.

    • Re:SETI (Score:4, Informative)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) * on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:15AM (#23585143) Homepage Journal
      Not to mention climate change prediction at home via climateprediction.net [climateprediction.net].

      • Re:SETI (Score:5, Funny)

        by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:41AM (#23585449) Homepage
        I guess that's irony; letting your computer consume large quantities of environmentally unfriendly produced electricity in order to calculate climate change.

        • Re:SETI (Score:5, Funny)

          by somersault ( 912633 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @10:15AM (#23585849) Homepage Journal
          It's better to think of it as job security.

      • Re:SETI (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Krigl ( 1025293 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @10:51AM (#23586349)
        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:SETI (Score:2)

          by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @01:11PM (#23588561) Journal
          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".

          The gap between Folding@Home and anything that addresses "Africa's hunger" is at least as speculative as anything in climatology, and not that much less than SETI.

        • Re:SETI (Score:2)

          by phulegart ( 997083 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @03:39PM (#23590821)
          Wow.. here I was, picking out posts that needed some moderation (since I'm sitting on points)... then I came across your post. So much for moderation.

          I can't decide if I should just reword what you've got there, in the standard /. tradition, or if I should just deal with the issues I see one at a time.

          Climatology is way too complex, with lots of unexplained and speculative stuff. Ok. I'll agree to that. You aren't a scientist? Ok. I'll tuck that fact away for future use. How would you have any clue as to what you should designate as "Junk Science" if you are not a scientist? As someone who is not a scientist, how would you have any clue as to how much more research needs to be done before ANY number crunching is done? Does it not occur to you that this number crunching you refer to *is* research? Shouldn't you be a scientist in this specific area before you condemn their actions in attempting to propel advancements in their field? As someone who admits NOT to be a specialist in climatology, what the hell do you know?

          And if they want the internet community involved, they should what?? Get Enlightened as to different image formats? Why? Because you don't like the size of that bmp? Because you realize that they could pass out even more finely detailed images that would be smaller, if they only know what YOU know? Do you already know ALL of the reasons they chose to use BMP? Did YOU inform them of alternate image format possibilities that provide them with ALL the advantages they believe they are getting from BMP images, while also getting other advantages YOU are aware of that they are apparently not aware of? Have you been in contact with them at all, about this image format problem that you see? Or are you waiting for someone ELSE to read your mind as to the details of this issue, and waiting for someone ELSE to send off an email that climateprediction.net should change formats? I mean, I get it. You want someone other than yourself to make a fuss about this BMP thing. You can find the time to post about it here, but you can't be bothered to mention the problem to the people who matter.

          Now... where is the address at the site Stanford put up to support Folding@Home? You know the address I'm talking about... the one that I can mail my frozen peas to, to feed starving folk in Africa. Because I didn't find it. No, you can't get away with saying that you were just pointing out how using Folding@home is LIKE actually sending food to end African hunger. I do get it that you are CLEARLY saying here that using anything other than Folding@Home (in your opinion) is a complete waste of time and energy... your wastebasket reference. But on the whole, and in parts, you are wrong. Folding@home is no more, or no less a waste of time than SETI@Home... or any other distributed processing that is being passed around. Remember, you are not a scientist. You have no idea if the numbers you are crunching are going toward a problem that is going to be solved in 5 years, or in 50 years... or at all. However, for all you know, data crunched for Climateprediction.net could provide positive and useful results in 2 years. You admit that you are not a scientist, or a climatologist. So you are simply an ignorant individual who is claiming to have all the right answers.

          Now... SETI. Ok. Fine. You don't believe that there is intelligent life out there in the Cosmos. You have done a good job in proving to me that there was no intelligence at work behind the creation of your post. So, since I see no evidence of thought or intelligence in your post, I should assume there is no intelligent life on Earth? Show me your proof that we are the only intelligent life in the Galaxy... or the Universe? I won't leave you hanging... you CAN'T prove it, because it is IMPOSSIBLE to prove that we are the only intelligent life out here. However, it is the height of arrogance and hubris to assume that we are the MOST intelligent species out here in the universe. We are on the v

    • Re:SETI (Score:2)

      by bWareiWare.co.uk ( 660144 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @10:01AM (#23585697) Homepage
      You realise folding at home is software right?

    • Re:SETI (Score:2)

      by an.echte.trilingue ( 1063180 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @10:17AM (#23585865) Homepage
      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:SETI (Score:3, Informative)

      by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @10:37AM (#23586161) Journal
      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.

    • BOINC - a whole infrastructure (Score:2)

      by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Saturday May 31, 2008 @01:56PM (#23611053) Homepage

      I am all for open source, but there are some better places to donate some spare cpu cycles
      And they are thing like BOINC [slashdot.org] which are complete opensource infrastructure for distributed computing, which are cross platform and feature lots of project you can pick from to contribute your spare time (among other, the original SETI, but also dozens of bio-medically related ones which will also have a similarly more close impact for humans as folding at home is).

  • It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:44AM (#23584807)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by abolitiontheory ( 1138999 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:49AM (#23584865)
      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 (Score:4, Informative)

        by Hairy Heron ( 1296923 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:52AM (#23584899)
        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:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:56AM (#23584933)
        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 being a source of CO2 and other nasties.

        • Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:5, Interesting)

          by abolitiontheory ( 1138999 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:05AM (#23585039)

          ... 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.

        • Real numbers (Score:3, Informative)

          by BLKMGK ( 34057 ) <{morejunk4me} {at} {hotmail.com}> on Thursday May 29, 2008 @10:00AM (#23585691) Homepage Journal
          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 has a 45nm C2D (E8400) clocked to 3.8Ghz, an 8800GTS (die shrunk too), a single HDD, multiple cooling fans.

          My point is that just because a PSU is rated for something doesn't mean it's going to be using that even when you have fairly thirsty components onboard - using the rating is a bit misleading as it's a maximum output. The fact that I use highly efficient supplies helps a great deal, they don't cost much more. My power bill isn't insignificant mind you but these aren't the only two computers I run either :-)

      • Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:2)

        by Idbar ( 1034346 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:20AM (#23585191)
        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 each individual.

      • Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:5, Informative)

        by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:48AM (#23585525)

        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 (Score:2)

        by jgoemat ( 565882 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:58AM (#23585661)

        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 mine and checking it out. Shutting down or hibernating will save you 200-300 watts total I'm guessing. Personally I have a couple of services running on my computer all the time so I can't shut it down completely, plus I like being able to just turn on the monitor and start working/gaming/surfing. So if you are going to leave your computer running you can save 1 kilowatt-hour every ten hours just from the extra power pulled to do the processing versus having the CPU usage low. Prices [doe.gov] vary, but if your CPU usage totals an extra 20 hours per day then that's an extra 2 kilowatt-hours per day or about 20 cents, totalling up to $75 or more a year in electricity bills. That also increases carbon emissions if your electricity comes from fossil fuels.

      • rough estimate ... (Score:2)

        by Lazy Jones ( 8403 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @06:00AM (#23597383) Homepage Journal
        Wikpedia [wikipedia.org]: Microwulf, a low cost desktop Beowulf cluster of 4 dual core Athlon 64 x2 3800+ computers, runs at 58 MFLOPS/Watt.

        BOINC [berkeley.edu] does about 1200 TFLOPS (= 1,200,000,000 MFLOPS) atm.

        => BOINC probably burns around 20MW (assuming that the power used is directly proportional to the CPU time used even if it isn't 100%, which is wrong but an upper bound and probably not very far off).

        1 KWh electricity = 0.43Kg CO2

        => BOINC generates 8.6 tons CO2 per hour or about 3100 tons/year (correct me if I'm wrong, I might be a few orders of magnitude off). That isn't very much compared to the 6b tons emitted by the USA anually, but still a waste...

    • Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:3, Funny)

      by Yvanhoe ( 564877 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:12AM (#23585121) Journal
      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 ;-)

      • 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 ;-)
        In that case, you are better off switching your computer off and sending the organization a check for whatever it would cost to run your computer at max load 24/7. Not only will you give them a much more useful work for the dollar (if the million nodes they wanted instead just have them just one dollar, they could easily buy a supercomputer), it will also save the environment by not using electricity by a million inefficient home desktop machines.
    • 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?

    • Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:2)

      by compro01 ( 777531 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @11:13AM (#23586669)
      to provide some numbers:

      According to my UPS, my computer (3.0ghz core2 duo E6850, 2GB ram, 8800GTS 640MB, 500GB hard drive, including modem and switch) consumes about 180W at idle (monitor/speakers/etc. off, torrents running). Running FaH (same as before, including torrents, but with FaH running on both cores), it sits at about 220W. Powered off, it registers at 5W. Running flat-out, it registers about 350W.

      Assuming it's running flat out 8 hours a day, that leaves 16 hours of off, idle, or FaH each day.

      Price of electricity here is 6.5 cents per KWhr, so that gives us this for the basic monthly cost:

      8*0.35=2.8KWhr = 18.2 cents per day or $5.46 monthly

      Now for the other 16 hours a day :

      off : 16*0.005=0.08KWHR = 0.5 cents per day or $0.15 monthly
      idle : 16*0.18=2.88KWhr = 18.7 cents per day or $5.61 monthly
      FaH : 16*0.22=3.52KWhr = 22.9 cents per day or $6.87 monthly

      total costs :

      off : $5.61/month
      idle : $11.07/month
      FaH : $12.33/month
    • That's why I run it on my shell server out in some datacenter instead. We pay the same no matter how much/little we use of ANYTHING on the server, so we might as well make use of it.

  • Why Fedora? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sysusr ( 971503 ) <sysusr AT linuxmail DOT org> on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:46AM (#23584831)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Silver Sloth ( 770927 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:47AM (#23584839)
    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:It's a bit nebulous (Score:2, Interesting)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) * on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:55AM (#23584921) Homepage Journal

      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 you would use something, you probably DON'T NEED IT!

      • Re:It's a bit nebulous (Score:2)

        by Blkdeath ( 530393 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @11:21AM (#23586795) Homepage

        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 you would use something, you probably DON'T NEED IT!

        As the old addage goes; when the only tool you have is a hammer suddenly every problem looks like a nail.

    • Re:It's a bit nebulous (Score:2)

      by ronaldb64 ( 633924 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @12:00PM (#23587393) Homepage Journal
      In other news, a new botnet was discovered. It consists of close to a million computers, all of them running Red Hat Fedora.
      The new botnet for Linux is seen as proof that Linux is threatening the monopoly of Windows in more than one area.

  • I have a better name ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lazy Jones ( 8403 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @08:50AM (#23584877) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Already done by others (Score:4, Informative)

    by pwilli ( 1102893 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:09AM (#23585075)
    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? (Score:3, Informative)

    by nweaver ( 113078 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:09AM (#23585081) Homepage
    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? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bazman ( 4849 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:11AM (#23585101) Journal
    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:Has he not heard of Boinc? (Score:2)

      by Bob Loblaw ( 545027 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @12:24PM (#23587721)
      From reading the linked articles, it seems the main difference is the way work is managed.

      With BONIC, clients redundantly get sent out chunks of work that get send out again if they expire without some response. So this can lead to really large and unpredictable lag times between work scheduling and work completion. Which is great for some tasks but not so great for others.

      With Condor, from the Condor website under the clearly indicated link "What is Condor?", "Should Condor detect that a machine is no longer available (such as a key press detected), in many circumstances Condor is able to transparently produce a checkpoint and migrate a job to a different machine which would otherwise be idle." So this means that work units are done with some consistent timing at the expense of increased complexity.

      This represents a pretty large difference in how the two systems operate. So before calling someone else an idiot for not doing their research, you should at least do your own or fall under the same label by your own criteria.

  • Mac users can do something like this already... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dekortage ( 697532 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:15AM (#23585147) Homepage

    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Luyseyal ( 3154 ) <swaters@NoSpAM.luy.info> on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:16AM (#23585165) Homepage

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

    -l

  • Che Fedora! (Score:3, Funny)

    by WheresMyDingo ( 659258 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @09:50AM (#23585547)
    Greedy capitalists, share your idle cycles! Power to the people!

  • BOINC != grid computing....Condor is (Score:2)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @10:34AM (#23586121) Journal
    To all you people saying "why don't you just use BOINC"

    Why indeed? Why not use BOTH. (As Condor can be configured to use BOINC when it's idle)

    With BOINC data is PULLED from them to you when YOU request it. In grid computing with Condor data is PUSHED to you.

    Big difference.

  • my spare cycles? (Score:2)

    by drew ( 2081 ) on Thursday May 29, 2008 @03:50PM (#23590981) Homepage
    I prefer Electric Sheep [electricsheep.org].

Slashdot Top Deals

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

Close