4 ms·
I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today. At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, f
by GuB-42 9mo ago
I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today.
At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.
Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
- thunderfork 9mo agoI generally run BOINC during the winter in place of a space heater, but that's only a cold month or two of the year.
- organsnyder 9mo agoMy homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.
- ragebol 9mo agoWhere can I buy a compute-for-heat home system? Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course
- speedgoose 9mo agoYou might prefer a heat pump.
- ragebol 9mo agoI do and have one actually. I have no idea if a kWh of compute could be worth more than eg. a kWh/(heat pump COP) though. Probably not...
- Sohcahtoa82 9mo agoMy understanding is that for most residential heat pumps, the temperature needed to make the heat pump less efficient than resistive heating is so low that it enters a range that the pump doesn't even work anymore. However, that's only a measure of efficiency. It could still be that the throughput isn't enough. A 30 kW resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW depending on outside temperature.
- mh- 9mo agoA late model Intel MacBook from eBay and pretty much any Electron app from 2020 should do it.
- GuB-42 9mo agoI remember some startups trying to install cryptominers in people homes, the idea was to use the electricity that would be spent heating the space anyways. The company would pay for the mining hardware while the customer would provide the electricity, and the profits would be shared. I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.
- cloud-oak 9mo agoI know of this one [1], a 1000W space heater with integrated cryptominer. Looks kike you can actually buy it now. Not sure how much the mined crypto offsets the heating costs though. [1] https://21energy.com/products/ofen-2 https://21energy.com/products/ofen-2