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This is a huge waste of energy / calculation power, right? I really, really understand the technical fancy behind this kind of parallel computing projects BUT

This is a huge waste of energy / calculation power, right? I really, really understand the technical fancy behind this kind of parallel computing projects BUT have to imagine the wast of energy this would cause if really used for a real world calculation jobs compared with a dedicated server farm... Or did the energy / calc-power realities change significantly lately?

jasonzemos 12y ago
What is the energy / calc-power reality? Your own workstation and a dedicated server farm both waste power if they're under-utilized. So for server farms, we've consolidated with "clouds." Unfortunately your workstation still sits idle most of the time, so now this is just a really large cloud to schedule that capacity as well.
- dangrossman 12y ago
  The power draw of my laptop under load versus typing this comment is almost 2:1. Under-utilized computers are not a waste of power, they're saving power. I'm especially not OK with unknowingly donating my battery capacity and limited cell data so CrowdProcess can sell it to someone while I read an article. This is just bad business for everyone involved (and the environment).
  - jasonzemos 12y ago
    > Under-utilized computers are not a waste of power, they're saving power. Does this mean we should fill homes and datacenters with a larger number of machines operating at fractional capacity in an effort to be more efficient than a smaller number fully utilized machines? This citation, ceteris paribus, seems to disagree: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6128960/what-is-the-relation-between-cpu-utilization-and-energy-consumption http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6128960/what-is-the-relat... > I'm especially not OK with unknowingly donating my battery capacity and limited cell data so CrowdProcess can sell ... That's fine, and I certainly agree, but it's off-topic to my question and this thread. I don't appreciate being summarily down-voted because every single comment is not in lock-step with berating the submitter on this point. There's a thread mentioning this, and I'm sure we all upvoted it. Thanks.
    - dangrossman 12y ago
      Say you have a computational task you want to run. You can run that on a single server for 1 minute, and use 5 watt-hours of power. Or you can translate it to JavaScript and run it on 50 web browsers for a minute each, and use at least 50 watt-hours of power. That's what this would look like, since you lose so much to having to use JavaScript, not having a dedicated server-class CPU devoted to your task, and to overhead of transferring the data to/from the client. Heck, you'll waste a bunch of power just sending the code and data to clients that leave the page before sending back results, which means their slice of the work has to be run multiple times on multiple computers. Same end result, 10+ times more electricity used, through a combination of having to do much more work, and doing it on much less efficient hardware. Money down the drain, pollution in the air. In reality the math is even worse than that for most tasks. So, nobody's suggesting you fill homes with more PCs for some reason. The suggestion is to leave the PCs we already own alone, drawing a fraction of their maximum possible electric usage. If you're going to try to better utilize existing capacity, do it by buying spot instances on AWS for pennies per hour, because those machines will give you vastly more computation per watt. It would also be more power-efficient to add a brand new dedicated server to the data center for these tasks than to utilize visitor web browsers.

jasonzemos 12y ago

What is the energy / calc-power reality? Your own workstation and a dedicated server farm both waste power if they're under-utilized. So for server farms, we've consolidated with "clouds." Unfortunately your workstation still sits idle most of the time, so now this is just a really large cloud to schedule that capacity as well.

dangrossman 12y ago
The power draw of my laptop under load versus typing this comment is almost 2:1. Under-utilized computers are not a waste of power, they're saving power. I'm especially not OK with unknowingly donating my battery capacity and limited cell data so CrowdProcess can sell it to someone while I read an article. This is just bad business for everyone involved (and the environment).
- jasonzemos 12y ago
  > Under-utilized computers are not a waste of power, they're saving power. Does this mean we should fill homes and datacenters with a larger number of machines operating at fractional capacity in an effort to be more efficient than a smaller number fully utilized machines? This citation, ceteris paribus, seems to disagree: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6128960/what-is-the-relation-between-cpu-utilization-and-energy-consumption http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6128960/what-is-the-relat... > I'm especially not OK with unknowingly donating my battery capacity and limited cell data so CrowdProcess can sell ... That's fine, and I certainly agree, but it's off-topic to my question and this thread. I don't appreciate being summarily down-voted because every single comment is not in lock-step with berating the submitter on this point. There's a thread mentioning this, and I'm sure we all upvoted it. Thanks.
  - dangrossman 12y ago
    Say you have a computational task you want to run. You can run that on a single server for 1 minute, and use 5 watt-hours of power. Or you can translate it to JavaScript and run it on 50 web browsers for a minute each, and use at least 50 watt-hours of power. That's what this would look like, since you lose so much to having to use JavaScript, not having a dedicated server-class CPU devoted to your task, and to overhead of transferring the data to/from the client. Heck, you'll waste a bunch of power just sending the code and data to clients that leave the page before sending back results, which means their slice of the work has to be run multiple times on multiple computers. Same end result, 10+ times more electricity used, through a combination of having to do much more work, and doing it on much less efficient hardware. Money down the drain, pollution in the air. In reality the math is even worse than that for most tasks. So, nobody's suggesting you fill homes with more PCs for some reason. The suggestion is to leave the PCs we already own alone, drawing a fraction of their maximum possible electric usage. If you're going to try to better utilize existing capacity, do it by buying spot instances on AWS for pennies per hour, because those machines will give you vastly more computation per watt. It would also be more power-efficient to add a brand new dedicated server to the data center for these tasks than to utilize visitor web browsers.