A few weeks ago, I had to purchase a new laptop to replace our old one which suffered an ignominious death by drop. The new one is a small AlienWare -- customized to purple by BootyKid2.
I decided to download Folding@Home for this new laptop as I usually do for all of the machines that I own. My son wanted to know why I decided to do this. I basically told him that there are mathematical problems that are so large and contain an enormous amount of data that thousands of computers are needed to solve the problem. Someday, we will be able to perhaps confirm the existence of aliens or even cure cancer.
On a somewhat related issue, One thing I had thought about how effective the Ushahidi engine was in regards to relaying information during the Haitian earthquake crisis. While no one person knew exactly what was going on and where it was going on in Haiti, the Ushahidi engine would effectively collectivize all of those individual voices and news articles and place them across a simple map.
Clay Shirky gave a talk at TED in regards to how this engine came about. He covers something that I briefly covered a few years ago. There's an awesome power of collaboration in the age we're living in. While this power can produce the inane like lolcats or non-creepy cosplay videos, the Ushahidi engine came about because of two programmers that read a blog from a Kenyan news activist.
This video runs about 13 minutes, but it's a good watch.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/896
(for future blog support ted:896)
#2 Jul 6 2010, 9:30 am
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I hope you really find some aliens.
Krypto from Destroy All Humans is my personal 2nd funniest game character of all time and I'd like to talk with an alien as hilarious as he is. Picture of Krypto | |
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#3 Jul 6 2010, 10:27 am
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EmpirezTeam wrote:
I hope you really find some aliens. Just to clarify, Folding@home is the cancer project, or perhaps more specifically, the protein folding project. SETI@home is the alien verification project. I just do Folding@home. Airjoe wrote: I mean, really, are people putting their quad cores to use by checking Facebook? Yes! This is exactly what people should be thinking. Whether it's idle computing power -- or as Clay Shirky lectures about, idle cognitive power -- leveraging it in a collective fashion can produce solutions on a global scale! | |
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#4 Jul 6 2010, 1:04 pm
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The only disadvantage of using idle computers for processing of this type is it takes energy. If every computer on the world(including cell phones) where 100% efficient(As in, using 100% of available resources) power usage would go through the roof and very likely fan life spans would plummet(assuming you have variable speed fans).
All that being said, I should set my nettop TV computer to do folding while idle. I had my PS3 do it for a few years, but an update about a year ago caused the feature to lock up my PS3. | |
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#5 Jul 6 2010, 5:01 pm
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Danial.Beta wrote:
The only disadvantage of using idle computers for processing of this type is it takes energy. If every computer on the world(including cell phones) where 100% efficient(As in, using 100% of available resources) power usage would go through the roof and very likely fan life spans would plummet(assuming you have variable speed fans). All that being said, I should set my nettop TV computer to do folding while idle. I had my PS3 do it for a few years, but an update about a year ago caused the feature to lock up my PS3. Yes, very true. My wife will not allow Folding@home to run our PS3 as it is, as she puts it, "a noisy, energy wasting, space heater". Unless I am unaware of an update in the past year, Folding@home can't run in the background on the PS3. On that note, the use of the various @home projects will not explicitly increase the amount of power consumed on a non-throttleable PC since the computer itself is powered on at the owner's will. | |
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#6 Jul 6 2010, 6:53 pm
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The PS3 can do folding as a screen saver, but no background folding.
As for the desktop, I generally only have my desktop powered on when I want to use it and rarely is it idle for long before I shut it down. If I did want it to be on all the time, folding would consume more power than it just sitting there idle because the screen turns off, the CPU downscales, and the HDDs power off. The power consumption of my PC drastically drops when I leave it alone. Of course I've never bought one of those fancy Kill-o-watt meters so I can't say how much it is using, but I'm sure it would be a sizable difference on my beast of a machine(well, yesteryear's beast at least). | |
If only more people would put their computers to use in distributed projects like Folding@Home or even RPI's own Milkway@Home... I mean, really, are people putting their quad cores to use by checking Facebook?
By the way, Harvey Mudd ranks at 4th best ROI in the United States. RPI came in at a paltry number 20- I only recently learned that we are the second most expensive school in the country!