Well, I guess it's like this:

When people get paid to go a job, they should just do it and deal with the backlash and responsibility - otherwise, quit.

I don't get paid to be here and neither do any of you....so, am I supposed to direct my frustration at you guys ? or the project ? EXACTLY.

Has not allowing yourself to be frustrated over this ever been an option? I personally choose to go through life thinking that patience and understanding go a long way to getting results you want.

Just because someone is paid to do a job, doesn't mean they have to deal with anger and attitudes. I constantly remind people of that every day at my job. My wages are an agreement to pay me for my skills, not to put up with upset people that have misplaced their frustration. Getting angry at the phone support guy or the clerk behind the desk or the bank teller that is not being very helpful to you is only going to take years off your life and create a bunch of negativity all around. Who needs that? They certainly don't, and I'm sure you don't either if you were in the position, regardless if you're getting paid to do the job.

I sincerely hope you do not continue to have that mindset for the rest of your life. Just because some poor schmuck working at Wal-Mart gets paid a wage, doesn't mean you have a right to get angry with them because the store made a new policy that has inconvenienced you. They are only doing the best they can with what they have been given (well, some of them anyway, but they still don't deserve your wrath).

I personally had a negative experience with Comcast's tech support that I could have gotten real angry over, but I know that it won't do any good and nothing good can come from it.

My cable modem friend during a lightning storm, so I called tech support, whom of course had to walk me through all the common steps of troubleshooting just to arrive at the conclusion I had already known. I could have gotten upset at the moron for insisting I follow his flow chart, but I went with it anyway.

I was then told that I could bring my cable modem in to my local Comcast store and get it replaced for free. Since I am internet-addicted, I made it a point to do it the very next day, to which I was told that they couldn't replace my type of cable modem because I have a VOIP modem that they don't carry and they were unsure as to why I was told I could exchange it there. I could have gotten pissed over this, and admittedly I was a little disappointed because I had made the drive, but the lady scheduled me an appointment with a tech to come to my house four days later. 4 days without internet.

I went to my local best buy and purchased a cable modem to be used in the interim. I called Comcast to activate this modem, and I had to wait on hold forever because they were confused as to what I was trying to do, and apparently there was some difficulty in disabling my old one without the replacement being there. The lady on the phone was very apologetic and was trying her best. I understood this and patiently waited. I could have gotten angry because they were holding me up, but I knew it wouldn't do me any good to get angry.

I simply don't see a reason to get so upset over the small things in life. I don't care how frustrated you are, or how "into it" you are, there's always a bigger picture that needs to be seen.

We are all passionate about SETI (or their credits), but getting angry or frustrated is not going to make them solve things any faster, nor will it bring in additional help or cash to alleviate the problem(s).

---

Well, I guess it's like this:

When people get paid to go a job, they should just do it and deal with the backlash and responsibility - otherwise, quit.

I don't get paid to be here and neither do any of you....so, am I supposed to direct my frustration at you guys ? or the project ? EXACTLY.

Has not allowing yourself to be frustrated over this ever been an option? I personally choose to go through life thinking that patience and understanding go a long way to getting results you want.

Just because someone is paid to do a job, doesn't mean they have to deal with anger and attitudes. I constantly remind people of that every day at my job. My wages are an agreement to pay me for my skills, not to put up with upset people that have misplaced their frustration.

I sincerely hope you do not continue to have that mindset for the rest of your life. Just because some poor schmuck working at Wal-Mart gets paid a wage, doesn't mean you have a right to get angry with them because the store made a new policy that has inconvenienced you. They are only doing the best they can with what they have been given (well, some of them anyway, but they still don't deserve your wrath).

Fair enough - I will try to be more positive from this post forward.......I have a habit of straying at times though ;)

---

I am TCP JESUS...The Carpenter Phenom Jesus....and HAMMERING is what I do best!
formerly known as...MC Hammer.

I would love to get one of the Atom based rigs up and running as a server here at home, unfortunately, given only a single PCI slot always leaves me choosing between Gigabit NIC and RAID card utilization......if the boards came with 2 slots for expansion card integration (or Gig LAN onboard + 1 PCI slot), I would be all over them.

I was looking at something else and came across the Supermicro X7SLA-H. Looking around the internet they seems to be running $120-$150.

It seems to be exactly what you would want. It has dual Gb connections and build in raid for the 4 sata ports.

If that wasn't enough. You could put a 24 port raid card in the PCIe x8 slot, or a 16 port one in the PCIe x4 slot.

---

SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I was looking at something else and came across the Supermicro X7SLA-H. Looking around the internet they seems to be running $120-$150.

It seems to be exactly what you would want. It has dual Gb connections and build in raid for the 4 sata ports.

If that wasn't enough. You could put a 24 port raid card in the PCIe x8 slot, or a 16 port one in the PCIe x4 slot.

I like Supermicro, but they made the same goofy mistake Intel made on the D945GCLF board.

The Atom processor is pretty light on power, but the 945GC is kind of power hungry. See the heatsink/fan in the picture? It is not on the CPU. The CPU is under one of the two passive heatsinks.

The 945GLE chipset drops the total power draw in half.

The other interesting chipset is the Nvidia ION, which adds CUDA-capable video onboard.

---

In a recent NPR Science Friday radio program on May 22nd, I heard Dan Werthimer say that in the ten years since SETI@home was started, five million SETI@home volunteers in 226 countries donated over three million years of computing time. That's an amazing accomplishment. I remember running SETI soon after it first became available, watching the numbers crunch and hoping someone would soon see some interesting signal... even a curious false signal.

However, it got me thinking about 3 million years of computing time crunching a CPU intensive algorithm. Is there some way to measure the economic cost of this, some way that we can quantify it? In running the program at home today, I realize that one method would be to estimate the approximate energy use.

I've spent a fair amount of time measuring the energy usage of various devices in my house, including my computers during various states (off, sleep, idle, and during peak activity). Normally my computers (2 PC's and 1 Mac for my family of 4) automatically go to sleep about 15 minutes of idle. Sleep is typically 1 or 2 watts, idle is about 60-100 (w/o monitor), and peak activity is 100-200 depending on whether it's only number crunching (like SETI) or during 3D game playing which utilizes the graphics card (not counting monitor).

Based on my computers, the energy usage and cost of these 3 million years of running SETI@home, assuming that about half the computers would normally be sleep or off if they weren't running SETI@home, is:

years: 3,000,000
hours/year: 8760
total hours: 26,280,000,000 hours
Typical Watts running SETI: 120 watts (w/o monitor)
Watts for idle computers (not in sleep): 100 watts
% of computers that would be normally off/sleep: 50%
watts for off/sleep: 2

Total energy used running SETI: 3,153,600,000 KWH
Energy if not running SETI: 1,340,280,000 KWH
Net energy used due to SETI: 1,813,320,000 KWH

Price per KWH: 8 cents (0.08 dollars)
Energy cost: 146,065,000 dollars
Gigawatt days: 75.56

So, if my calculations are correct, the total cost to run SETI@home to date has been about $146 million dollars in electricity or roughly the equivalent of a 1000 megawatt power plan running for 2.5 months.

I guess it just demonstrates the adage "There's no such thing as a free lunch"

Regards,

Steven Miller
booboobaby@yahoo.com

Great post. Now consider that in the UK the electricity prices are 3 times what you have estimated! It's shocking isn't it?!

---

I am shocked...............

I have run my cache out on all 4 of my boxes and shut them down in anticipation of a 10 day vacation beginning tomorrow.

Now is less noise in the house, the A/C actually stops running even now in the late afternoon. Now with CUDA being enabled the boxes are giving out a lot more heat than when it was just CPU's crunching and now I see the effects of it on the A/C. I had seen reports of the electricity cost of crunching but always felt it was exagerated. Now I'm not so sure. My home is actually cool now without the added heat load from the computers running.

In the past I have left my boxes crunching while gone on vacation. I even left them on when hurricane Ike payed us a visit. This time just decided to shut it down. The problems at Berkeley are a large part of why I came to this decision to shut down. I hope they get it going while I am gone.

---

Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....

I am shocked...............

I have run my cache out on all 4 of my boxes and shut them down in anticipation of a 10 day vacation beginning tomorrow.

Now is less noise in the house, the A/C actually stops running even now in the late afternoon. Now with CUDA being enabled the boxes are giving out a lot more heat than when it was just CPU's crunching and now I see the effects of it on the A/C. I had seen reports of the electricity cost of crunching but always felt it was exagerated. Now I'm not so sure. My home is actually cool now without the added heat load from the computers running.

In the past I have left my boxes crunching while gone on vacation. I even left them on when hurricane Ike payed us a visit. This time just decided to shut it down. The problems at Berkeley are a large part of why I came to this decision to shut down. I hope they get it going while I am gone.

But in the winter I would imagine that heat would be welcomed. As it would not be heat just for the sake of heat. Yesterday I was routing some network cables to my sun room to stick some computer in there. Get them out of my computer room and let it cool off a bit.

---

SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

This thread repeats the inconsistency, or tension inherent with volunteer distributed computing. Boinc assumes a free lunch, which is never the case. So volunteers need to judge how much they are willing to spend of their own resources (money) to contribute the projects. I'm amazed that people are surprised when the matter of energy use (and other costs) are brought up.

Locally we are paying $0.10/KWH, but will likely soon pay twice that due to Congress's mob-insanity. It is probably time to reconsider why any of us are still running computers with RAC's less than 100; clearly the probability that they will 'find ET' has diminished because newer computers are so much faster and productive. Equally clear is that these older generation boxes are doing less and costing more.

Seti could do the world, and themselves, a favor by not issuing wu's to these slow computers. I know that perspective isn't popular, but it is rational.

This RAC speed limit is rather uncertain and depends on the project you are running. For example here are my RACs:
AQUA 708
QMC 296
Einstein 204
CPDN 143
SETI 143
All equal shared. Which is mine RAC?
Tullio

---

RAC also varies with resource share and hours-per-day, so it's probably not the best metric to test with.

You could try floating point speed, but that would catch Ned's Atom, which is very energy efficient.

Or you could just leave it to users' conscience - and try and distribute some extra conscience points with the tasks and through this message board.

Wouldn't a good way to keep the extra expenses to a minimum be to turn of the monitor when you aren't actually in front of your machine? It's my understanding that the monitor uses the most power in the system, so I just turn it off and crunch away.

so, can we say that keeping our computers busy crunching for SETI cost us on average ,say, 50$/month per person?

Seti could do the world, and themselves, a favor by not issuing wu's to these slow computers. I know that perspective isn't popular, but it is rational.

What if the world doesn't want any favors?

---

Wouldn't a good way to keep the extra expenses to a minimum be to turn of the monitor when you aren't actually in front of your machine? It's my understanding that the monitor uses the most power in the system, so I just turn it off and crunch away.

My LCD monitor draws about 15 watts when fully on. It's pretty typical for a single monitor setup.

---

Seti could do the world, and themselves, a favor by not issuing wu's to these slow computers. I know that perspective isn't popular, but it is rational.

What if the world doesn't want any favors?

Not to mention that it depends on what type of rational one is using. We can talk about energy efficiency all we want, but that doesn't change the fact that many people simply do not have the up front costs of replacing their system, nor does it address the "why replace it if it still works" mentality that many people have. Not everyone upgrades just because there's something new(er) out. A lady down the street from me still uses an old AMD Athlon Socket A 1.1GHz CPU, completely loaded with start-up software. The thing takes (no joke) ten minutes to boot Windows XP, and she refuses to replace it because it still works.

---

Seti could do the world, and themselves, a favor by not issuing wu's to these slow computers. I know that perspective isn't popular, but it is rational.

What if the world doesn't want any favors?

Not to mention that it depends on what type of rational one is using. We can talk about energy efficiency all we want, but that doesn't change the fact that many people simply do not have the up front costs of replacing their system, nor does it address the "why replace it if it still works" mentality that many people have. Not everyone upgrades just because there's something new(er) out. A lady down the street from me still uses an old AMD Athlon Socket A 1.1GHz CPU, completely loaded with start-up software. The thing takes (no joke) ten minutes to boot Windows XP, and she refuses to replace it because it still works.

You mean that that I need to tell my boss that we need to replace my triple Xeon 400mhz system just because it's old? I'm not sure that "being old" would justify the $50-60,000 to replace it. Granted it's performance per watt might actually come out to a negative number somehow lol. It might be old but it does do exactly what we need of it really well. Even with seti running on all 3 cpus.

My home systems on the other hand. I am optimizing to get the best performance/watt out of them. Testing things like 5% overclock used 10% more power. So scratch that one. Running with 2 instead of 4 memory dimms. and I just bought some eSATA brackets to connect a dvd drive externally so I don't have to leave a drive in the system all the time sucking down power.

---

SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Somehow I knew we would have this discussion after my post...

What sense is there in running a 60 RAC machine today? The ones I own and I turned off recently draw as much power or more than my simple quad, which is about 80x more productive (Wu's per Watt-hr AND Wu's per Month).

Now, if all machines were running about 60 RAC, as they might have been a few years ago, then obviously turning them off would have had an impact on the project. But today, I suspect that turning them off will not change the project RAC very much at all. So, if ET is to be found, then it is highly more probable that one of these senior citizen hosts will not be the one who found it/him/her. Living in Montana I learned never to p_ss into the wind, a life lesson applicable to many other fields.

A project that brags about having a lot of active users, which includes a large population who are almost as active as stones, is hardly "pushing the envelope of science" any more. Instead it is becoming an embarassment. Seti would probably be a better project with fewer do-almost-nothing hosts, to the extent that the demand on Berekely would be reduced if these hosts were forced to expire. (I'm not advocating euthanasia here because most of these hosts have no anthropomorphic souls.)

Those who cannot justify the cost of upgrading to better hardware, should be able to justify turning the beasts off when they aren't using them, if they took the time to think about the economics. Tell that lady down the street that turning off her computer when its not being used could save her $30/month, enough to pay for a second cat or something. Or, after about a year she could buy a modern machine with the savings. Ignorance is no defense in most courts.

"What if the world doesn't want any favors?" Huh? The whole world wants favors as long as someone else pays for them. I know I do. In the present context, we want cheap power so that we can keep our clunker hosts running with minimal expense. So, these people decide, lets build more power plants and take on more long term debt to pay for it (read: our grandchildren can pay for it).

Of course, I'm not preaching to the guy with a clunker that actually pays for itself in some other way, like running a business. On the other hand, dumping a working but complex system for a simpler one that works better at less cost might be the better decision, especially today when the cost of capital (interest rates) is so low. And if it happens to run seti, too, then we have a Win-Win!

Ignore my last...had thread sorted the wron way.

---

Somehow I knew we would have this discussion after my post...

Well, if you keep bringing it up, people are going to offer a counter-point.

What sense is there in running a 60 RAC machine today?

Because it works and not everyone has the money up front to buy a new system. Not everyone wants to replace a system simply because it is more energy efficient.

Living in Montana I learned never to p_ss into the wind, a life lesson applicable to many other fields.

Some people would argue that adding to landfills and replacing electronics or cars is just as much "pissing into the wind" as running energy efficient machines. Sure, there's programs available to prevent old electronics from goign to a landfill, but some people would rather not throw out perfectly good items to begin with.

A project that brags about having a lot of active users, which includes a large population who are almost as active as stones, is hardly "pushing the envelope of science" any more. Instead it is becoming an embarassment. Seti would probably be a better project with fewer do-almost-nothing hosts, to the extent that the demand on Berekely would be reduced if these hosts were forced to expire. (I'm not advocating euthanasia here because most of these hosts have no anthropomorphic souls.)

Wow. An embarassment, huh? I'm glad not everyone thinks as you do. Its one thing to want to tweak everything to optimum efficiency, but its another thing to start telling people what they should run. If that's the case, then BOINC should also start limiting the number of computers a cruncher can have because it isn't very "green" to build or buy machines just to create a waste product for BOINC to harvest.

Those who cannot justify the cost of upgrading to better hardware, should be able to justify turning the beasts off when they aren't using them, if they took the time to think about the economics. Tell that lady down the street that turning off her computer when its not being used could save her $30/month, enough to pay for a second cat or something. Or, after about a year she could buy a modern machine with the savings. Ignorance is no defense in most courts.

Who said anything about ignorance? Simply not wanting to do something for perfectly legimitate reasons does not mean they are being ignorant.

Its also a good thing we're not in court over this. You can tell her all you want (or all I want) that she could save money in the long run, but that still requires an up-front cost of buying the new system, or to replace a perfectly good system that still works. Not everyone is interested in doing so.

You can make the same argument for buying a hybrid car: its more efficient than a completely fuel-based car, and it can pay itself off in about 5-7 years, not to mention being better for the environment to boot. That doesn't change the fact that many people aren't interested in replacing their cars if they're working pefectly fine. You could say its an "embarassement" to the United States for any citizen to be using anything that ruins our ozone or burns our fossil fuels, and that the U.S. should be the leading example for the rest of the world, but that's still not going to make people want to run out and buy new cars.

"What if the world doesn't want any favors?" Huh? The whole world wants favors as long as someone else pays for them. I know I do.

Just like you've learned economically not to "piss into the wind", I've learned that no favor comes without strings attached. Therefor, I don't want any favors from anyone.

Of course, I'm not preaching to the guy with a clunker that actually pays for itself in some other way, like running a business. On the other hand, dumping a working but complex system for a simpler one that works better at less cost might be the better decision, especially today when the cost of capital (interest rates) is so low. And if it happens to run seti, too, then we have a Win-Win!

...but you're preaching to everyone else who isn't interested in listening. Sure, some people might take your advice, but you're also suggesting that SETI cut off those who won't do as you suggest, and that if SETI doesn't become more "green", they are somehow an "embarassment". If they don't want to buy a newer system, and its their hard earned money that pays for things, they can do as they wish, including running older, inefficient systems. SETI has no interest in telling people what they should run.

---

Here's what My average cost per KWh should be: $0.03239(after a 20% Care Rate Discount), My Electricity cost Me $61.31 last month, I don't know what My next bill will be like of course, As there have been what I'd think are minor reductions in usage around here, 2 clocks(one with big red leds that's a clock radio), 2 older Ethernet devices were replaced with a new model 7500 DSL Modem/Router(Its Black too), I'd be surprised If the bill was under $61 of course as I've had to run the cooler on high, sometimes 24/7 and If certain things I've put in motion bear fruit I plan to do some hdd(750GB 7200rpm, instead of 10,000rpm and 150GB+250GB[7200rpm]) and cooling(CoolIT DM-1000 Domino A.L.C. CPU Cooler) upgrades to this PC, Plus getting the A/C's Refrigerant refilled($120) in My Car. I'm not sure which is hotter 109F outside yesterday or the A/C in My Car right now. :o

---

CA HSR built a foundation, is laying Track!
PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550 Loco, US's 1st HST

I think that the best way to save energy would be to build homes which do not need any air conditioning and maybe have at least water heating panels on their roof, if photovoltaic panels are too costly or complicated to install for bureaucratic reasons like in Italy. But electricity costs 20 eurocents/kWh, so the price differential would not be that high. I have no air conditioning, no electric heating and my PC has no graphic boards, only an Opteron 1210 running Linux at 1.8 GHz 24/7. My electric energy consumption is ~5 kWh/day, and my latest bill was 69 euros for three months.
Tullio

---