Q. How many computational cycles pass idlely by each day in our computing labs?

A. With ~210 computers we were producing an average of about 400 GFLOPS (billion floating point operations per second) (*40,000 credits/day), which is not too shabby to say the least.

Q. Is there a way to take advantage of idle cpu time while allowing the students full access to computing resources on demand?

A. The BOINC client met our needs.

Q. Is it worth investing the time/effort in creating a BOINC server for research at UTSC?

A. At the present our needs are met through our high performance computing cluster. However, we have some applications that would be well suited for this type of computing architecture.

Q. What costs are involved?

A. We can neglect the cost of the hardware since it\\\\\\'s already here. The extra wear and tear on the hardware is covered by the manufactures extended (4yr) warranty. So what we have left is power. These applications are CPU intensive and do not require any other significant resources. An idle Dell Optiplex GX620 desktop runs at 71 Watts versus 126 Watts at maximum CPU usage. Thus every system takes an extra 55 Watts during normal downtime. Downtime is rougly 12 hours per day for the computers.