Recycling Your CPU: Find a Cure For Cancer, Locate Extra-Terrestrial Life Or Make The Internet More Efficient
by Karin Kloosterman, Jerusalem, Israel on 06.29.07
During the times you leave your computer idle, your CPU is just being wasted. According to a Tel Aviv University (TAU) professor, there are some great ways to put all that number computing potential to good use. While researching ways to map out the shape of the Internet, Yuval Shavitt, an engineer, chanced upon a community that has collected millions of volunteers to monitor electromagnetic radiation in the sky. Calculations done on their computers are working to see if there is someone on another planet trying to communicate with Earth. (Beep beep beep. Beep beep. Beep. Earth to TreeHuggers?)
Seeing the potential of such collective efforts, he asked people to donate their CPU to help him develop a topological map of the Internet. The goal was to help determine major nodes of usage of Internet highways and sidetrack them so applications can better select peers for performing a certain task, like sharing a file.
Better understanding of the Internet’s topology can improve other processes as well, such as web surfing, and voice and video streaming applications. In the process, Shavitt discovered that the Internet is shaped like a sphere with a dense nucleus.
“What we are doing is exactly like Astronomy but at the micro level,” says Shavitt, “This is a green initiative because it makes use of CPU that would just go to waste. In fact, we use very little CPU, so we are even greener than other 'distribute computing' projects.”
Shavitt developed a software called DIMES and has found 5,500 international volunteers to download the program to 12,000 computers at locations from New York to Tokyo. Taking brief measurements of where the PCs connect to “nodes” (Internet service providers and large information hubs such as Google), Shavitt determined with his mathematical model that the Internet is sphere-shaped and contains three primary layers.
Since publishing his research and intentions to map out weekly visualizations of the Internet, reports the press release issued by the University, Shavitt has sparked interest not only in the scientific community, but also among artists and spiritual seekers. He says, “I have had people contact me looking for the connection between the evolution of the Internet and the concept of Zen. While interesting to delve into these questions, I am mostly interested in the forces that drive the Internet and to help make the system work better.”
For more information see www.netdimes.org And here's a quick guide to greening your computer. ::TAU
could you post a list of links to the various places to get these programs? it would make it much easier to scan through them.
I'm not convinced. Modern computers use different amounts of power depending on how busy they are. If I'm running this on an otherwise idle PC, that PC will be using more power than if it were just sitting there. And if it were just sitting there, it's using more power than if I put it into hibernation.
So, basically my question is: What has this to do with treehugging?
And here I thought environmentalists would be all against this. these type of programs make your processor be used at 100% capacity 100% of the time.
I've been running the cure for cancer one http://www.nfcr.org/Default.aspx?tabid=399 for a while. It seems to be stopped now though. I'll move on to protein folding. Something useful, who cares about aliens.
Oh here is a list of distributing projects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
There are a few interesting climate ones
http://bbc.cpdn.org/
http://climateprediction.net/
using one of these programs can cause more than a hundred additional watts of power consumption. And they're less power efficient than actually buying time on a real parallel computing cluster. The only reason they exist is because the people running the project can get all those computational resources for free.
I have my work computer and my Mac Mini home server running climateprediction.net and Seti@Home with their processor cycles. I keep the Mini up 24/7, since it's running torrents and serving up some data via HTTP and syncing my backups to my web host (which is carbon-neutral).
My work computer is a MacBook Pro, and it's only running it when I'm using it, which means all the cycles I'm not using which would otherwise go to waste are being used for something.
I'm a little disappointed to see this at the TreeHugger.
Why not just SHUT THE FREAKING COMPUTER OFF?
I have to chime in here - I'm a software engineer, and I can say unequivocally that using your computer for these tasks when it's not doing anything else is incredibly energy-intensive. Your computer not only uses more energy to do more work (that's basic physics), but then it can't hibernate or sleep.
If you're going to waste vast amounts of energy with your computer, you may as well cure cancer while you're at it.
Editorial note: this post was about a project that can make the internet more efficient. If a map of the internet can help developers make programs that let us download files faster, isn't that TreeHugger?
Well you see i was thinking, why not use this "potential power" to make the most out of older computers. Maybe you can run a 2 ghz minimum game on a 1.6 ghz computer...though how?
Hi guys.
About the DIMES project: as a user and a programmer in the project I can assure you that the application is wasting negligible amount of energy of your computer: less than 1% of your CPU power.
More than that: you can run the application in a service mode - with no GUI - and in this situation the lack of energy use will be even greater. Another point that was mentioned before: the aim of the project is to map the internet to make it a more faster and efficient for use. Efficiency means power saving. Isn't it green? Remember we aren't bunch of people who are trying to make money from your computers. We are researchers.
For doenloads: http://www.netdimes.org/new/?q=node/10
Thanks,
Ido