Cost of distributed computing, over 150$ per year per computer!

[Amaroque]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: waffleironhead
I'm assuming that most if not all people realise that leaving electricity comsuming products turned on will cost you.
This thread made about as much sense as posting in a car forum. "Driving your car 24 hours a day at 100mph will use a lot of gas!!!!!!"

That's a pretty good analogy for running DC projects, actually.

lol That's kind of funny when you think about it.

Oh, BTW: Great pics aigomorla.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: taltamir
Assuming the absolute lowest priced electricity in texas 12cents per KWH (average is 14 + tax)
1368.75 kwh/year x 0.12$/kwh = 164.25$

Where'd you get that number? I'm in Texas, and I pay (including taxes) 6.5 cents per KWH for the first 500, then 9 for the next xxx KWH (I don't know what xxx is because I haven't reached that cutoff, even in summer when my AC nearly doubles consumption). Last month, I paid under 7 cents per KWH average.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
Where'd you get that number? I'm in Texas, and I pay (including taxes) 6.5 cents per KWH for the first 500, then 9 for the next xxx KWH (I don't know what xxx is because I haven't reached that cutoff, even in summer when my AC nearly doubles consumption). Last month, I paid under 7 cents per KWH average.

Damn!! That's it, I'm moving to Austin. I have the absolute cheapest electricity in Dallas, and I pay 13.9 cents/kwhr. Most people in Dallas buy their electricity from TXU, and the last time I checked their rates (roughly a year ago), they were charging 15 cents/kwhr. Now, how much is it going to cost me to have a 3,000 sq. ft. two-story house moved 215 miles?:shocked:

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: CTho9305
Where'd you get that number? I'm in Texas, and I pay (including taxes) 6.5 cents per KWH for the first 500, then 9 for the next xxx KWH (I don't know what xxx is because I haven't reached that cutoff, even in summer when my AC nearly doubles consumption). Last month, I paid under 7 cents per KWH average.

Damn!! That's it, I'm moving to Austin. I have the absolute cheapest electricity in Dallas, and I pay 13.9 cents/kwhr. Most people in Dallas buy their electricity from TXU, and the last time I checked their rates (roughly a year ago), they were charging 15 cents/kwhr. Now, how much is it going to cost me to have a 3,000 sq. ft. two-story house moved 215 miles?:shocked:

No kidding, I live 20mi south of Fort Worth and I pay $.153 to TXU:thumbsdown:

 

[Insidious]

I know we already kind of digressed beyond some of the earlier parts of this thread, but this (at one point) seemed kind of relevant. It makes me happy to be part of Folding@Home!

January 03, 2008
Binding of a ligand (small molecule drug) to proteins
Today, I'm going to post a nice summary of one major facet of FAH, the study of protein-ligand binding. This issue is critical for computational drug design, and brings together many parts of what we do with FAH. This summary was written by Peter Kasson and I'm going to paste it verbatim, since I think he did a nice job with it.

We're often interested in comparing things--predicting a known difference is a good way to test our methods. Then, once we're pretty confident that things work, we want to predict ways to change the way proteins interact. Changing a system in a defined way is both a good tool for biological insight and the basis for a lot of medical treatments.

In this particular case, we're interested in the "selectivity" of ligand binding by a protein: the protein is known to bind one small molecule ("ligand") much better than another. So 3903/3905 is a pair of projects comparing the protein-small molecule interactions, one project for each small molecule. 3906/3907 are the essential "control" projects that tells us how different the small molecules are in the way that they interact with the water around them. When we combine these pairs of projects, we can then calculate the difference between the "bound" state in which the protein is interacting with the small molecule and the "unbound" state in which the protein and small molecule each just interact with the environment. There are experimental data on the difference between these two small molecules; if we get good results here, we'll go on to test a number of interactions that aren't experimentally known yet.

The trick is that some protein-small molecule interactions are quite easy to test experimentally and some are very hard. Using Folding@Home, they are all moderate in difficulty. So if we can validate our methods on the "easy" ones, we can then predict the "hard" ones. Usually only a small fraction of protein-small molecule interactions that one tests turn out to be important. For the ones we predict are really interesting, we can do the experiment. But Folding@Home allows us to skip the experiments that are both hard and likely not to be interesting. This sounds simple, but it can be very powerful in trying to understand the underlying biology.

We also hope that it can help us understand a number of diseases and drug interactions better. For instance, a number of diseases or "failures" of medical therapy are due to mutations in proteins (changes to their amino acid sequence). We would like to understand how these mutations affect the interactions between the protein and the drug. If we can understand that, we can help suggest ways to improve the drug therapy. This is obviously a large, hard problem, but we think that Folding@Home can play an important role here.

I don't think donating a Watt or two to this is anything that could be described as 'waste'

-Sid

 

[Markfw]

Way to go Sid ! (for finding this)

 

[biodoc]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
Way to go Sid ! (for finding this)

:thumbsup::beer:

 

[Amaroque]

Thanks for posting that Sid!

 

[Assimilator1]

Nice find sid

aigomorla
Wow! nice rig but juicey too

Engineer
Good to see you

Gleem
A note to DC people: please be civil like you would be in the DC forum Aren't we always trying to encourage others that might see our posts to check out the DC forum and help out their Anandtech TeAm?

Agreed :thumbsup:

taltamir
No replie to my earlier post?

 

[m1ldslide1]

Yeah thanks for the article Sid - I started folding in early December, article published in early January, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that I contributed some! Even if in reality its just in spirit.

And also for Taltamir, I wouldn't worry about wireless. If you have enough knowledge to overclock, you should have enough knowledge to encrypt with WPA2 - AES and use a strong password for your PSK, thus ensuring that you'll never be sharing your connection with your neighbor. I've done a lot of LAN tests between two devices with gigabit NICs, and haven't ever been able to push above 125Mbps on an FTP file transfer, or using utilities like q-check. I'm not really sure what the limitation is - I don't know enough about NIC's specifically, or about Windows. I do however know a lot about routers and the internet, and the propagation delay you'll incur doing wireless will be minimal compared to what you get traversing 10 ISP's (and who knows how many physical links) to reach your favorite game server. It's really not something to worry about. As far as your claims about causing cancer, those are unsubstantiated, so I wouldn't worry too much just yet. I'm sure that all the other sh!t that we breathe and eat every day (which is substantiated) will have a negative effect far sooner than will the wireless.

I guess when all is said and done I'm struggling to understand why this is such a heated debate when there are so many greater energy concerns in the world. You guys say that we could save the cash that we spend on power consumption and donate it directly to cancer research. I say that you could save the time you spend being critical of DC, and donate that time to bicycle and public transportation advocacy!

 

[m1ldslide1]

Sorry - DP.

 

[waffleironhead]

Originally posted by: m1ldslide1
I say that you could save the time you spend being critical of DC, and donate that time to bicycle and public transportation advocacy!

:thumbsup: Nicely said

 

[VirtualLarry]

My electric bill went up to $68, from $50.

(Both months I had my two machines running 24x7, so it's not the computers causing the rise, I don't know what is.)

 

[Shortass]

All this means to me is that I'll be a little more careful with turning off my monitor when I'm not using it, not to mention the dozens of lightbulbs that are sometimes left on. Maybe instead of overclocking to the bleeding edge of my system I'll take it down 400 or 600 mhz, which can be negligible but apparently mutliply by a ridiculous amount the system's power consumption.

F@H is wonderful, and if any new DC program comes out that somehow researches Cancer better than it will take my cycles... but the idea of not donating a little money to something that has the potential to save billions of lives seems ridiculous to me.

 

[Assimilator1]

Maybe instead of overclocking to the bleeding edge of my system I'll take it down 400 or 600 mhz, which can be negligible but apparently mutliply by a ridiculous amount the system's power consumption

It'll only significantly reduce power consumption dropping clock speed that much if the vcore can also be signifcantly dropped.
Big increases in power consumption from higher clock speeds is mainly a result of the vcore being bumped up a lot.
The optimal performance/energy point for overclocking is upto the speed which needs no or little vcore increase.

Carry on folding

 

[VirtualLarry]

After looking at XBitLabs recent article on the Q9300, specifically the power consumption section - it shows the Q6600 @ 3.6GHz under 100% load as taking nearly 400W for the system.
Am I correct in calculating that 400 x 24hr x 30days = 288000 watt-hours of electric, so at $0.10 per KWH, that's $28.8 - PER MONTH for power just for the computer.

How much do you folks that run F@H on your dedicated crunching quads pay for power? I was thinking of setting up some dedicated crunching rigs myself, but this cost is starting to scare me off.

 

[Insidious]

MY GOD MAN
That's thousands of dollars every century :shocked:



Gas is $3.00 per gallon........... yet I somehow manage to drive my car

Beer is $25.00 a case........... yet somehow I manage to refresh myself

Golf is $50.00 a round.......... but still I manage to go outside and play

Don't EVEN ask me how much it costs to take advantage of middle-aged women on these cold weekend nights...... but I still manage to knock the dust off

Are you getting the point here?

You can pop for a $1,200.00 computer..... but you are "scared" by the cost of actually turning it on?

I DON'T GET IT

:roll:

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
After looking at XBitLabs recent article on the Q9300, specifically the power consumption section - it shows the Q6600 @ 3.6GHz under 100% load as taking nearly 400W for the system.
Am I correct in calculating that 400 x 24hr x 30days = 288000 watt-hours of electric, so at $0.10 per KWH, that's $28.8 - PER MONTH for power just for the computer.

How much do you folks that run F@H on your dedicated crunching quads pay for power? I was thinking of setting up some dedicated crunching rigs myself, but this cost is starting to scare me off.

Yes, that's correct. However, you won't be stressing your video card, so you'd have to subtract that wattage. It's probably more like 250-275 watts (from the wall), with only the CPU and RAM being stressed, along with the other things that computers require. That's still a hell of a lot of power to be wasting 24/7, IMO, and that's only for one machine.

edit: Also, I didn't go look for the article you mention, but most areticles of that type also include the power that the monitor uses. So it's probably closer to 200-225 watts per overclocked quad. Of couse, that's still alot, IMO, since it's running 24/7.

 

[Insidious]

I love your definition of "Waste": Adding to scientific knowledge

but Orange box, Crysis, WoW, myspace, facebook, ITunes, Instant messengers, Bit Torrent, this fofum, internet porn.... are not a concern to you in the slightest.

BRILLILANT

If you don't want to do DC fine.... but please spare the rest of us these nonsensical rationalizations.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: Insidious
If you don't want to do DC fine.... but please spare the rest of us these nonsensical rationalizations.

First of all, Sid, I'm sure you can't comprehend this, but not one single person who owns a gaming system leaves it running any game whatsoever 24/7. Most gamers game between one and four hours per day, and actually turn the system off, when they aren't using it. Secondly, if you are F@H's best spokesperson, no wonder most people don't fold.

edit: And just in case someone wondered, no, I'm not against folding. I just think that with all of the computational power they've had over the past 7 or 8 years, that they should have been able to find a cure for nearly every disease that it's possible to solve with a computer. Then again, I can't think of any diseases that it would be possible to find a cure for, using computers.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
After looking at XBitLabs recent article on the Q9300, specifically the power consumption section - it shows the Q6600 @ 3.6GHz under 100% load as taking nearly 400W for the system.
Am I correct in calculating that 400 x 24hr x 30days = 288000 watt-hours of electric, so at $0.10 per KWH, that's $28.8 - PER MONTH for power just for the computer.

How much do you folks that run F@H on your dedicated crunching quads pay for power? I was thinking of setting up some dedicated crunching rigs myself, but this cost is starting to scare me off.

my APC UPS measures wattage use of all things connected to it, i have connected:
1 x 20.1inch montor
1 x 17inch monitor
1 x M-Audio LX4 2.1 Speakers
1 x Printer
1 x Desk lamp
1 x PC in Sig

Things in bold are on whenever i'm at my desk and the UPS tells me i'm using 340-350Watts fluctuating when running Folding at home. My rig alone uses 235Watts while running Folding @ Home

i'll continue to fold for as long as i could.

i also spend my weekends at NYC bars @ $8/beer and drive a v6 240hp car and turn my receiver to use my HT speakers when watching plain tv.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: Insidious
If you don't want to do DC fine.... but please spare the rest of us these nonsensical rationalizations.

First of all, Sid, I'm sure you can't comprehend this, but not one single person who owns a gaming system leaves it running any game whatsoever 24/7. Most gamers game between one and four hours per day, and actually turn the system off, when they aren't using it. Secondly, if you are F@H's best spokesperson, no wonder most people don't fold.

edit: And just in case someone wondered, no, I'm not against folding. I just think that with all of the computational power they've had over the past 7 or 8 years, that they should have been able to find a cure for nearly every disease that it's possible to solve with a computer. Then again, I can't think of any diseases that it would be possible to find a cure for, using computers.

And you have a PHD from how many universities ? And you propose to know more than all the researchers at Stanford, Berkley and all the other places ?

Once you have proven that you are the smartest person in the world, I would believe that statement. Until then, I put my money on all the PHD's in the world, not you.

 

[gingerstewart55]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Assuming the absolute lowest priced electricity in texas 12cents per KWH (average is 14 + tax)

Dude, you need to move if your electricity costs are so high. Where I live, our elec. runs 7.4 cents per kwh.

That's a whole 5 cents per kwh.....and that's why it seems expensive where you live. And while you may scoff at just a nickel per kwh, my typical elec. bill is around 2000 kwh per month.......you do the math at the 5 cent per kwh difference and tell me if you'd like paying an extra $100/mo. just because of a nickel.

Must suck to live where you do..........

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
And you have a PHD from how many universities ? And you propose to know more than all the researchers at Stanford, Berkley and all the other places ?

Once you have proven that you are the smartest person in the world, I would believe that statement. Until then, I put my money on all the PHD's in the world, not you.

Exactly how many PhD's do you have? I can assure you, I've got many hundreds of times as much experience as you have, when it comes to treating people with both curable and incurable diseases. As much as some of you seem to believe, computers aren't the answer to all of mankind's problems, be they medical, or not.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: Markfw900
And you have a PHD from how many universities ? And you propose to know more than all the researchers at Stanford, Berkley and all the other places ?

Once you have proven that you are the smartest person in the world, I would believe that statement. Until then, I put my money on all the PHD's in the world, not you.

Exactly how many PhD's do you have? I can assure you, I've got many hundreds of times as much experience as you have, when it comes to treating people with both curable and incurable diseases. As much as some of you seem to believe, computers aren't the answer to all of mankind's problems, be they medical, or not.

You aren't answering my question. I never said I had any PHD's, I said I would trust the THOUSANDS that do, and are researching cancer, not you, unless you can prove you know more than all the researchers in the world.