"Nightlife" Harnesses Idle Fedora Nodes For Research 171
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.
It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re:It's a bit nebulous (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Mac users can do something like this already... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's not the idle capacity I'm worried about (Score:2, Interesting)
You can go for a happy medium. Configure your system to keep the processors scaled back to minimum clock speed and then use the idle cycles. The power consumption will go up as compared to a completely idle system, but not very much, and you'll still have a lot of cycles to donate. Also, your machine should be able to sustain that load without speeding up the fans.