8 ms·
Ask HN: What fuel for my data furnace?
I have a server with two old 6-core Xeon CPUs in it. In winter I used to run it full tilt on SETI and get a noticeable bump in room temperature.
Now that SETI is mothballed, what charity or mining software would you recommend I run? Anything more productive than re-calculating pi is my goal.
- slater 3y agoMay I interest you in the magical world of... ... CRYPTO MINING???
- heartag 3y agoMy very uninformed understanding is that asic miners made cpu mining irrelevant a while back. Is that not the case?
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoDepends on the cryptocurrency. Some are designed to be intentionally difficult-to-impossible to optimize with an asic, with Monero being the big one I think is most well known.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> Monero uses randomx, an ASIC-resistant and CPU-friendly POW algorithm created by Monero community members, designed to make the use of mining-specific hardware unfeasible. https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/calculator?h=54.00&p=280.00&pc=0.15&pf=0.00&d=296618425110.00000000&r=0.65000000&er=0.00393262&btcer=44239.65000000&ha=KH&hc=3995.00&hs=0&hq=1 https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/calculator?h=54.00&p=... https://xmrig.com/benchmark https://xmrig.com/benchmark
- bpicolo 3y ago> two old 6-core Xeon CPUs in it Unless electricity is free, probably gonna spend more on electricity than they're making in monero (or any other coin).
- belltaco 3y agoIf OP is using a space heater or an electrical furnace to heat their home, then the money they make would offset the electricity bill a bit, since computers are efficient heaters. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/gaming-pc-vs-space-heater-efficiency-511/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/gaming-pc-vs-spac...
- tomatovole 3y agoThis is not true for all crypto coins. A small proportion of mining hash functions are deliberately designed to thwart ASICs, e.g. https://github.com/tevador/RandomX https://github.com/tevador/RandomX. It's a cat-and-mouse game, though: CryptoNight was designed to fulfill the same role, but ultimately failed: https://monerodocs.org/proof-of-work/cryptonight/ https://monerodocs.org/proof-of-work/cryptonight/.
- focusedone 3y ago(List of Volunteer Computing Projects)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...] There's quite a few out there, most of which are BOINC based. Just a few clicks on your existing SETI setup and you'll be turning electrons into radiant heat.
- heartag 3y agoThank you!
- focusedone 3y agoAlso I don't know how to markdown.
- jabroni_salad 3y agoHN doesnt let you make pretty hyperlinks, it's why another comment in the thread has numbered footnotes instead.
- n3t 3y agoI run fishnet[0] to help Lichess[1] analyze chess games. [0]: https://github.com/lichess-org/fishnet https://github.com/lichess-org/fishnet [1]: https://lichess.org/ https://lichess.org/
- mondobe 3y agoOne idea is the World Community grid, a lot of great projects for different causes. The link below is the Dinosaur Comics team (slightly biased here), but there are plenty of others. Haven't researched it very much, but this just popped into my head. https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=412W2GKRLR1 https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?team...
- heartag 3y agoThank you for the recommendation! I wound up installing BOINC and adding WCG along with a few others.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoMy personal recommendation would be Folding@Home[1]. Protein folding is an insanely complex thing life does and they use distributed computing to try to solve the large problems. 1. https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en
- kyboren 3y agoI've been wondering about this for a while now: Does F@H actually still have a real purpose, or is it purely a vanity project at this point? My lay impression is that AlphaFold (and now AlphaFold v2) solves the same problem F@H solves, but better, faster, and cheaper (at least, if compute power wasn't all donated). Is that not true? Are they somehow complementary? Just how much did AlphaFold eat F@H's lunch?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoF@H is a physics simulation. It is going to get closer to truth as we understand it. AlphaFold is going to be more pattern matching based on previously identified relationships. AF did a tremendous amount of work in patching up our spotty structure database, but those hairy, novel regions are still going to require extensive computation to model, which is better done by simulation.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoF@H simulates down to the atoms to verify, while AlphaFold uses AI to take shortcuts humans can't see with our limited variable tracking ability. If the projects start working together, I can potentially see AlphaFold generating simulations of interest and sending them to Folding@Home to distribute and verify. They are both working towards the same goal, but with different methods. Sort of like DSL vs Cable internet - both deliver the internet but how it gets there and what each technology allows you to do due to the difference between telephone lines and coaxial cable are quite different, and can even run side by side for extra coverage in case of an ISP outage :)
- heartag 3y agoThank you for the recommendation!
- unboxingelf 3y agodownload stable diffusion and generate weird images, forever.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoArchiveTeam Warrior, help preserve internet history: https://warrior.archiveteam.org/ https://warrior.archiveteam.org/ Granted, the Warrior is probably more network-bound than CPU-bound.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoIf you go to http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ rather than https, it won't hassle you about the warrior. subdomain not being an altname for the SSL certificate. Warriorhq. is on the cert though.
- heartag 3y agoThank you for the recommendation! I actually tried warrior a while back, but noticed it was mostly just backing up reddit porn, and decided not all things require archival.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoI think you can select which archiving projects you want to help with.
- voisin 3y agoAm I wrong to think that most of this effort will ultimately be for nothing when quantum computing comes to fruition and does all this work practically instantly? Perhaps best to get an efficient space heater that is turned on when needed?
- tmountain 3y agoIt’s more applicable to some problems than others, but many hard problems today will be solved in a trivial fashion.
- anon25783 3y agoYes, you are wrong to think that. Every computer is manufactured with the knowledge that we will have superior computers in just a few years. :)
- cshimmin 3y agoAm I wrong to think about eating food today when I will eventually be dead, at which point I won't require food ever again?
- selfhoster11 3y agoIf you have enough system RAM, you could make it into an AI server. This is more GPU VRAM bound more than anything else, but software like llama.cpp will let you run mixed inference across a GPU and your CPU. Check out /r/LocalLlama on Reddit if you would like to learn more. Of course image generation models are also an option and generally need less VRAM.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- jj999 3y agohttps://distributed.net https://distributed.net is still going on while newfangled seti@home is dead
- Havoc 3y agoBoinc is still a thing