LWN: Comments on "Fedora harnesses the power of idle computers with Nightlife"

Free software, free computing => patented results?

roelofs — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:48:38 +0000

Is anyone else discomfitted by the thought that many of the positive/useful results produced by all this donated CPU time will undoubtedly be patented and either spun off into for-profit startups or licensed to already immensely wealthy megacorporations? Stanford may be the poster child for such commercial spinoffs, but it's by no means unique; TTBOMK, most major research universities now operate this way.

I'm thinking specifically of biotech here, for which patents are the lifeblood (so to speak). The biomedical/pharma industry is already the single biggest obstacle to useful US patent reform, and while it would be unfair to lay the entire US healthcare mess at its feet, biotech patents are certainly a contributor to said mess. I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the specific research examples listed by Dr. Laidig are related to biotechnology. That's where many of the most pressing and computationally difficult problems lie, and it's also unquestionably where the big money is. Extraterrestrials, gravity waves, prime numbers, and the hypothetical transuranic "island of stability" just aren't in the same league.

Btw, I'm not claiming this is a new concern, nor one that's unique to Nightlife; the same questions arise for Folding@Home and any number of taxpayer-funded research programs, for example. I'm just surprised that it wasn't mentioned as an issue alongside energy consumption.

Greg

Save energy!

sstein — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:27:35 +0000

Folks, I suggest that people start turning off their computers during night. I know it is cool
to have a system running for 523 days without reboot, but just think how much energy you can
save in those days as well.

Power use and Heat

nix — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:09:16 +0000

Central heating in towns and cities in the UK is pretty universally 
natural gas-based. Outlying regions might use oil-based heating, storage 
heaters, or stranger systems, and places with broken or very old central 
heating or bad insulation might choose to stick electrical heaters in some 
rooms. Pure house-wide electricity-based systems are unheard of (by me at 
least): even heating your water with electricity is an emergency fallback 
for when the gas or boiler goes out. (It's also pretty much a historical 
curiosity: in thirty years I've never seen a built-in electrical immersion 
heater used, but they're still widely fitted).

Power use and Heat

tialaramex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:59:25 +0000

Sorry, that should be £1 per watt _per annum_ of course, ie over a year's usage switching off
something that wastes 100 watts saves you about £100. If it wastes 100 watts for 6 hours per
day, that's £25. It's a rule of thumb, so your specific tariffs may be rather different
depending on the mixture of fixed versus variable costs, but probably not by an order of
magnitude.

Power use and Heat

tialaramex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:50:08 +0000

So fine, I live in the UK too. If you have a whole house on a single thermostat that usually
means you're using gas central heating. In which case heating your house by leaving a PC
turned on is already horribly inefficient because of the price difference between gas and
electricity. You also live in a temperate country, where the house doesn't need to be heated
for most of the year (and indeed may be uncomfortably hot for a month or two each summer).

Any radiators installed since the popularity of home central heating in the UK really began
will have bypass valves so that you can disable radiators in unused parts of the house (e.g. a
spare bedroom) or add a cheap local thermostat (included in newer installations) which
bypasses when that room is above a certain temperature. Most installers will skip rooms that
are rarely occupied and can be heated by conduction or convection from elsewhere, such as
closets.

Any installation that's less than 30 years old will have a timer as well as the thermostat and
manual control, and newer ones will have a seven day variable timer. Typically this means you
only heat the house for a few hours every day, usually when you wake up (it's not nice to wake
in a cold house, and the timer may also control production of stored hot water for the
bathroom) and for a while in the afternoon or evening. There's no need to heat the house while
you're asleep, you will be comfortable at a lower temperature and the bedding insulates you
anyway.

The idea that all heat energy released by inefficient use is "free heating" in some way just
doesn't work out in reality. Unless you've got an electric element or fan heater next to the
PC that you leave switched on all the time, chances are that turning the PC off is a
significant net saving (I tend to work to £1 per watt as a rule of thumb).

Power use and Heat

giraffedata — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:08:07 +0000

I believe central electric heating is rare in the US, because it's cheaper and more useful to put a separate electric heater in every room. In contrast, gas/coal/oil systems are centralized because it isn't practical to put a burner in every room. Or even a thermostat.

I've seen central electric (forced air is worth paying more for for many people), just not very much.

I don't know why that would differ between the UK and the US, though.

Power use and Heat

wookey — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:44:27 +0000

whilst systems this dumb are indeed very common, things are steadily improving as people get
programmable room stats, TRVs, boiler managers, and even fancy linux-controlled home-autoation
systems. As eneergy prices rise the benefits of having a more flexible control system
increase.

I agree with your fundamental point that exactly how usefully your computers do or do not
contribute to house heating depends on the control system installed.

Power use and Heat

nix — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:01:38 +0000

I don't know about you, but in the UK we have a wide choice of heating: we 
can heat the whole house on a thermostat or we can heat none of it at all.

So the `heating unoccupied rooms' thing is irrelevant at best, because the 
standard central heating heats *all* rooms, including all the unoccupied 
ones.

Power use and Heat

tialaramex — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:06:34 +0000

Still a few caveats...

I used to think this way but then I spent more time pondering it. If you do have electric
heating it will usually be optimised to heat spaces where people live and work. Heating any
part of the house when it's empty (ignoring frost protection), or the closet with a household
server in it, or a spare bedroom, or even a living room when everyone's asleep upstairs, is
still mostly useless because no people benefit.

It's true in principle that you can find situations where the power isn't "wasted" by turning
it into heat, but they're rarer than might first appear. Maybe $100 spent running a PC
translates to $10 of "free" heating for some people, and even more for a few, but that's still
a poor reason to leave all that hardware running when energy prices are rising.

Fedora harnesses the power of idle computers with Nightlife

dberkholz — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:38:56 +0000

Excellent, thanks for taking the time to point that out!

Fedora harnesses the power of idle computers with Nightlife

ivazquez — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:59:03 +0000

http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/condor/

Fedora harnesses the power of idle computers with Nightlife

dberkholz — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:19:07 +0000

I understand your implication that it was Red Hat. Is that in fact the truth, or are you just
suggesting it's likely? My recollection is that they said they intended to open the source at
some point, but the build was extremely messy.

Fedora harnesses the power of idle computers with Nightlife

ivazquez — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:14:03 +0000

Who do you think convinced them to open-source it?

Re: License

mmcgrath — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:34:05 +0000

Looks like as of 6.9.5 its released under the Apache license.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/license.html

Fedora harnesses the power of idle computers with Nightlife

dberkholz — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:32:48 +0000

The last time I checked (a year or two ago), Condor wasn't open source. I'm surprised RH would
push it, if that's still the case.

Power use and Heat

zlynx — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 03:02:12 +0000

One way to run a project like this and not be wasting power would be to run it during the
winter.  If your dwelling uses any electric heat, then running computer systems is better than
running a heater.

All power use returns as heat in the end, so there is no better way to get that heat than to
do computing with it, instead of wasting that potential by just driving the power through a
resistive heating coil!