mikyopiiJul 29, 2023

If you have spare computing power, consider donating some of that to a distributed computing project

https://programming.dev/post/1042285

If you have spare computing power, consider donating some of that to a distributed computing project - programming.dev

Berkeley has this really cool program called BOINC that you can download and donate your computer’s resources to processing scientific data. There are a bunch of projects to pick, from working on climate change, to cancer, to the Large Hadron Collider. The good folks at linuxserver.io [http://linuxserver.io] even have a ready to go Docker container for easy setup: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/boinc [https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/boinc] Another possibility is running the Archive Team’s Warrior, which downloads data from at risk web sites and uploads them to the Internet Archive: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior [https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior] Does anyone else have examples of projects like this? My dream is for the Fediverse to have this sort of feature eventually.

Show threadrahJul 29, 2023
What do you mean by “spare”? Modern CPUs scale their electricity usage according to utilisation.
Show threaderos
One would assume they mean sitting around, doing nothing. Some would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.
Jul 29, 2023 at 4:48pmWeb
Show threadHauiJul 29, 2023
That makes sense. Thank you.
Show threadrahJul 30, 2023

would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.

That’s not “spare” though. That’s my point.

Show threaderosAug 4, 2023

I mean yeah, but no. It is spare capacity, so it’s spare in one way.

I have hundreds of gigaflops of computing power sitting idle 80% of the time, I just don’t think the taxpayers would appreciate the power bill if I put it all to use like that. But at home I can spare a few cycles on my solar power sipping Proxmox cluster.

Show threadrahAug 4, 2023

I have a spare room in my house sat idle 80% of the time. I could easily install a few racks of servers in there and have some gigaflops of computing power to contribute.

But actually, being “idle” isn’t the same thing as “spare” because it would cost a lot of money to install racks of servers, just as it costs money to run computations on an otherwise idle computer.

So I mean no, but no. It’s only spare capacity in a stupid, convoluted way that’s disconnected from common sense.

But you managed to brag about having hundreds of gigaflops of taxpayer-funded computing at your fingertips so good for you, you go for that validation from strangers on the Internet.