::scr Seti@Home & Global Warming

[Alaric Snell]

On Friday 17 May 2002 11:54, you wrote:
> Is someone good at maths?  I was just wondering if it's possible to
> work out how energy consumption has been 'wasted' on the Seti@Home
> project?  There's a lot of computers out there that never idle,
> continually sucking up electricity and leading to depletion of
> various fuel resources.
>
> In fact it'd be interesting to put it into units that can scare people
> properly like, how many nuclear power stations does it take to run, or
> how many life support machines could be run on the same power...
>
> Should projects like Seti@Home or The Grid be accountable for the
> resources that are consumed for their projects?

Ah, but how much power would those computers be taking idle? I'm not sure how 
much less power modern CPUs use when executing HLT instructions in an idle 
loop, or even how efficient Windows *is* about signalling idle time to the 
hardware.

We need measurements! AC ammeters connected to PCs being idle or running 
stuff to measure energy consumption per unit of seti@home work done. I'm not 
incredibly confident that it'll make a difference, though.

Given that difference, if any, and throughput statistics that are probably on 
the seti@home site somewhere it should be possible to multiple that energy 
cost per unit (in kWh) by average worldwide throughput in units per hour and 
thus produce a kilowattage...

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software