Junk Super Computer Assimilates All

VonGuard writes "The ACCRC is the relatively famous computer recycling non-profit in Berkeley that builds clusters out of old hardware. Make Blog has an article about the Center's plans to build a cluster out of the equipment people bring to recycle at Make Faire later this month. The ACCRC geeks are now able to integrate PII's or better into the cluster, which will be powered by Vegetable Oil and run Parallel Knoppix."

veggie oil?

[Evoluder]

is it really cheaper than plain old power company? maybe it scales cheaper?

Why give them to a million dollar university ?

[Anonymous Coward]

when you could donate your old PC to a worthwhile charity, that would help the local or even an African community a lot more than some CS students messing about with Knoppix

universities should be donating their old stuff to the poor, not playing with Knoppix and acheiving very little (except a large electricity bill)

Re:veggie oil?

[blincoln]

If you look at a typical utility bill you're talking pennies a kilowatt hour.

I think their idea is to counteract the concept that for the same amount of power, they could be running much more powerful hardware. If the electricity comes from coal, they're wasting energy, but if it comes from biodiesel they're... uh... wasting energy in a way that sounds good to hippies?

Worth it?

[Galahad2]

I wonder if the power consumption of a low-end Pentium 2 is actually worth the computation capability it could contribute to a network. There's definitely a point at which it costs more to run a computer than you can get out of it -- where does that line fall?

Re:Why give them to a million dollar university ?

[why-did-I-wakeup]

They are doing something: learning. They are having fun and at the same time learning about parrallel computing. I'm jealous of them; I would love to have lots of old crap that I could set up and run some sort of parallel computing software. Not to mention this hardware is basically unusable so the poor african towns could possibly have more trouble setting the stuff up than they are worth. Especially if they have to put in a connection to the internet. That could be hundreds of thousands of US dollars to do if the village is far away from a city.

Saw this years ago on 20/20 or 60min

[ScrewTivo]

It was amazing what they were doing way back then. Before discussing the practicality of this you have to remember that a lot of what they do is teaching people about computers and providing refurbished computers to the poor. So now they get to learn about building super computers, it doesn't make a difference if a new multi-core system can outperform it or not, it's the lesson that is important. And tossing in a bio-diesel generator is precious!

BTW, he was talking of building a supercomputer way back then. So the group has put some thought into this.

If this turns out that it actually has some horsepower I can't wait to hear how it is put to use. The guy who started this is way ahead of the curve. Turning garbage into a self powered supercomputer...kewl!!

Re:Worth it?

[bear_phillips]

A good point, but a better question is which is more power efficient: 1) running 4 old dontated computers or 2) building and manufacturing a new computer.

Re:What a colossal...

[tux_deamon]

I think the point is is that the equipment being used is old discarded hardware. New fast computers cost money. This organization is reusing this old hardware and keeping it out of a landfill.

Re:You must warn them all!

[diablomonic]

only the Stud Bulls get to breed, and if you were going to be classed as one of those, I dont think youd be needing the help

Re:Why give them to a million dollar university ?

[omeomi]

I worked at a computer lab through college. There was a mountain of old computers and monitors stacked in the back of one of the lesser-used labs. I asked once why they didn't give them to charity, or sell them or something. It turned out that the paperwork to get rid of them was more of a pain than it was worth. So they just sat there taking up space...hooray for red tape.

Re:What a colossal...

[Elastri]

Electricity costs money too, and it keeps costing money even after the initial capital purchase (or lack-there-of). If you're building a cluster powerful enough to be comparable with even a couple low-mid end modern PCs you're not going to be running for too long before you hit the point where the power savings makes the modern PCs less expensive. A more thorough explanation can be found in these two posts from a beowulf mailing list:

http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2003-March/009658.h tml [beowulf.org]
http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2003-March/009662.h tml [beowulf.org]

Re:veggie oil?

[Eivind]

Curious, I thought with an efficient enough fuel cell (run off natural gas) you could generate power in your home, avoid the inefficiency of losing power during the power line travel...

Yes. But you'd add the inefficiency of having to transport the natural gas somehow. Which also costs energy. No, natural gas floating in pipes is *not* obviously that much more energy-efficient than electrons floating in wires, it depends on the details. (one thick pipe offers less friction than many small ones, higher voltage power-lines give lower losses)

if I remember my physics, correctly, the power lost during transmission is proportional to i^2 where i is the current.

Yeah. In absolute terms. But offcourse in this case your power transmitted is higher too, so your losses, measured as a percentage, doesn't go up that rapidly.

The oposite is also true though: If you up the voltage, then you can scale back the current needed for a certain power by the same amount, which leads to lower losses. Multiply your voltage by 10, and you can divide current by 10, and still transmit the same power. But at 1/10th the current, this means, by your formula, that the losses are now only 1/100th of what they where.

I thought the process of transforming the energy to and from that state was fairly inefficient (but better then sending it down the power line without doing it. It's been a long time.

Where'd you get that idea ? Large transformers achieve efficiencies in the 99.75% range, and even the small ugly wall-wart transformers that are mass-made at a buck a piece from the cheapest possible materials frequently manage to come in at 95%

It's like the fact that modern day farms are actually far less efficient then ones from 100 years ago, from an energy perspective.

Yes. But only from that perspective, which isn't the one we're trying to optimise for. Our current economical system optimises for production-efficiency. And a single person working on a farm produces probably 100 times more than a single person working on a farm did 100 years ago.

Energy isn't lacking. Not even *clean* energy is lacking, there's plenty of it to go around. The only reason it's not dominant is that currently non-clean energy is cheaper. It's perfectly possible to make clean energy enough to supply current and forseeable needs. But the thing is, with current tech it costs more. I don't know the numbers for US, but for example in Norway wind-power costs double of normal power (which is hydro with us, so also clean, but let's ignore that). In Germany there's a minimum prize given for home-produced energy of $0,50 or so, which is more than enough to make it a paying proposition (i.e. you make a *profit* by installing solar-cells on your roof), but which also happens to be like 4 times the price of conventional power.

A farm using only clean energy would still be a hell of a lot more efficient than the ones 100 years ago. But thing is: it'd be *less* (financially) efficient than the farms that burn oil. So that's what's happening.

But the scale is slowly tipping. The price of oil and gas has raised a lot, and ist likely to raise a lot more. The price of solar, wind, hydro, thermal and so on has all been falling steadily, and will continue to do so.