::scr Seti@Home & Global Warming

[Chris Devers]

On Fri, 17 May 2002, Dave Turner wrote:

> Is someone good at maths?

Oh yes, surely someone out there has to be. :)

> 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.

I'd be interested in seeing a comparison between an "idle" computer and
one that is crunching Seti units. My guess is that the power consumption
difference isn't going to be that significant, but maybe I'm wrong. Isn't
the biggest power consumer the monitor anyway? For a truly idle computer,
just turning off the monitor when you're away probably helps more.

> Should projects like Seti@Home or The Grid be accountable for the
> resources that are consumed for their projects?

Meh, I think it's a decent use of otherwise untapped, latent resources.
Much more wasteful would be the fleet of SUVs that everyone seems to love,
or for that matter lawnmowers. Lawnmowers aren't held to the efficiency
and emissions standards that other gasoline engines are, so they burn
through lots of gas in a very dirty way. Seems like I read a while back
that half of the CO2 emissions Americans produce these days comes from
plain old lawnmowers, and they've far surpassed other vehicles there.

"Choose your battles." :)


--
Chris Devers                                chdevers@mac.com
Apache / mod_perl / http://homepage.mac.com/chdevers/resume/

"More war soon. You know how it is."    -- mnftiu.cc