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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Chat Room
Thread: cost who |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 27
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SpaceCat
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Nov 23, 2005 Post Count: 115 Status: Offline |
AAww.. My systems were on 24/7/365 before I started with the DC projects, and will probably be on 24/7/365 if I ever decide to stop contributing. The additional cost of a few watts of power to run them at 100% is chicken feed. If somebody is worried about the electric bill, turn off the T.V. when no one is sitting in front of the thing or use 60watt bulbs instead of the 75 to 100 watt ones. My biggest power hog rig sucks 105watts at idle and 115 watts full load. (As reported by UPS monitoring software.)
----------------------------------------Not even a big enough increase to be worth mentioning when talking energy costs.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
 Blue Gene running Windows 98! |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
any comments on what other charities could do with that sort of money? The goods ones would take 6% - 10% for overheads, others would take more. If you gave your name and address etc then the charity could get the tax back from Gordon Brown to the tune of 20%. However to get the amount of processing power they would either have to buy time on a existing super computer (if one could, I have no idea if you can or what the going rate would be  ), or collect enough money to buy and run their own super computer, or take out a loan to buy their own super computer, pay to run it and pay off the interest on the loan.In term of cold hard economics it probably more cost effective for us to by the small amount of increased electricity bill and donate the processor time than to donate the money. Now in terms of energy efficiency it becomes more interesting, with a supercomputer not only do you consume large amounts of power to run it, you also need to consume signficant amounts of energy to dispose of the heat you generate. Where as here in the UK, at least, most people don't run air conditioning so the only energy consumed is that of your PC, and as was pointed out in an earlier post there is the saving you make on the reduced amount of energy you need to heat the room containing your PC. |
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GEORGE DOMINIC
Senior Cruncher Joined: Nov 21, 2004 Post Count: 227 Status: Offline |
well its an added bonus to find were paying £50 grand a day to prove my computer is in the worlds top %3 i used to take bench marks seriously before the WCG, any body got any results with 64 bit machines theres a debate that there actually slower in sum functions.
PS. THIS IS STILL A GREAT CAUSE long live the WCG DEMT www.twra5t.co.uk |
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MLCBA
Senior Cruncher Joined: Nov 30, 2004 Post Count: 225 Status: Offline |
Hi, there. I agree that the cost of electricity is minimal especially during the winter. But no one mentioned the hardware cost. Those HDD are solicited a lot with WCG they will crash. And what about the lost data and the time spent reinstalling all that software and rearranging your data.
----------------------------------------I know any HDD will go bad eventually but I think WCG just give it a push over the cliff. Don’t get me wrong. I have been running WCG for a year and before that it was SETI and Folding at home. It is just that everyone must be aware of the implication. It is not free.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi, there. I agree that the cost of electricity is minimal especially during the winter. But no one mentioned the hardware cost. Those HDD are solicited a lot with WCG they will crash. quote]
In 25+ years or working with computers I have only ever had 2 HDDs fail totally whilst in use, and they were due to overheating this summer. The others (10 tops) have failed at power up. I have a couple of SCSI drive on a server at work which can be a bit of a pain to reboot, but this is normally due the fact that the server room has no heating and we shutdown everything over the Christmas break, so that the maintence engineers can mess about with the power factor correction systems during shut down. However if the server is left powered on for an hour or so it warms the drives enough that they will spin up properly. But hey the server is 8 years old running NT4 and the drives are filled to about 90% capacity. I can recall bad blocks occuring on some systems, but I can't recall having had any of those for at least 5 years, and then it was more often than not due to outside factors (users rearranging their desks with the PC turned on). Modern HDDs are fairly resiliant and have fairly long life, and I suspect that you would either need to change your computer or increase the size of the HDD long before you wore it out. |
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SpaceCat
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Nov 23, 2005 Post Count: 115 Status: Offline |
Hi, there. I agree that the cost of electricity is minimal especially during the winter. But no one mentioned the hardware cost. Those HDD are solicited a lot with WCG they will crash. And what about the lost data and the time spent reinstalling all that software and rearranging your data. I know any HDD will go bad eventually but I think WCG just give it a push over the cliff. Don’t get me wrong. I have been running WCG for a year and before that it was SETI and Folding at home. It is just that everyone must be aware of the implication. It is not free. How much ram you running with? at 512mb I note very little activity. And don't even run a swap file on my system with 1gig ram. I just shut down F@H and WCG on that one when I go to play my games.  Bet if I took the thing to 2gig I wouldn't even have to do that... |
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David Autumns
Ace Cruncher UK Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 11062 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi MLCBA
----------------------------------------I have been running the UD agent in it's various guises for over 7 years of combined run time (I know you have a few more  )In all of that time not a single disk fault on about (I lost count) 11 PC's. One of the original 5Gb drives has been going since the launch of the Cancer Research project over at UD.com. It's crunching HPF at the moment I need to get another memory stick My secret MAXTOR I wouldn't build a PC with any other make. Never let me down once. ASUS Mobo's, Corsair RAM (Even Value Select) and Maxtor HD's and you won't go far wrong. This is not an advert and I have no affiliation or shares in any of the above. They just give me reliable crunching For what it's worth Dave  |
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David Autumns
Ace Cruncher UK Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 11062 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Pwrguru@bc
Cruncher Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Post Count: 5 Status: Offline |
I thought that I would throw my two cents in on this subject....While the heat from the computers does help out in the winter, it can add a few dollars to your electric bill in the summer....
I live in Florida and the summers do get quite warm...Now add on at least ten computers running 24/7 tends to make the A/c work overtime..I am not complaining in any way but just pointing out that it does cost to contribute to this worthy cause more for some, less for others... |
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