When I first got my i7 6-core with quad GTX-690s (2 GPUs per card), I naively let Seti@Home run rampant when the computer was idle. Room they were in got up to around 90F when I let it run 100%.
Sad to see they're shutting down.
Sad to see they're shutting down.
I'm still curious about the extent to which the claim of idle compute power going to waste was true when various projects were set up. For example, the press release about the Cooperative Computing Awards (I've forgotten whether this was 1998 or 1999) says
> However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-offers-cooperative-co...
The main thing I can think of that would have supported the concept of idle cycles going to waste was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction)
> [the CPU-idle instruction] was not specifically designed to reduce power consumption until the release of the Intel DX4 processor in 1994.
I participated in DESChall and distributed.net's RC5 challenge and I remember being told, and telling others, that we were only using resources that would otherwise have gone to waste. Were we already greatly mistaken about that in 1997?
- The baseline electricity the computer is using. This will get used and produce no S@H work either way (in an era where our computers didn't go to sleep)
- The added electricity to do S@H work. This certainly was not idle, but also was a relatively small amount relative to an entire household's use.
- The hardware itself.
I would say that S@H were making use of hardware that was "going to waste" (this is CAPEX the project didn't need to spend), was having volunteers donate the added electricity, and could be said to be making use of the baseline electricity inasmuch as it would be used either way, and if S@H were to set up their own compute cluster, they would also incur similar overhead.
I don't know what system efficiencies were like in the late 90's, but I would totally believe someone if they said "idle" was 40% the power consumption of "max usage". Using that number as an example, "donated electricity" gets (1/0.6=) 1.6x as much compute-per-watt as if it was donated to run an equivalent, dedicated, machine. Maybe you can convince yourself that you were using "idle cycles" and donating on top of that?
So running distributed.net or Seti@Home was using unused processing capacity for a marginal increase in power draw. If you ran them overnight with your monitor (CRT typically) your computer was drawing less power than if you were sitting up all night on IRC or playing Quake. This changed once frequency scaling was commonplace on desktops.