Vintage & unusual Computers on Einstein@Home

DanNeely
DanNeely
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RE: The cost of electricity

Message 69824 in response to message 69823

Quote:
The cost of electricity is not really a factor that concerns me. The environmental consequences are far more troubling and that factor rather than dollars is much more likely to stem my profligacy. :).

Do you have the oportunity to double or treble your electric bill to use green energy then?

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
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RE: The cost of

Message 69825 in response to message 69823

Quote:

The cost of electricity is not really a factor that concerns me. The environmental consequences are far more troubling and that factor rather than dollars is much more likely to stem my profligacy. :).


Interesting question: buying a new PC carries an environmental price tag as well (CO2 emissions & chemical waste for production, and costs related to the disposal of the unit when it's eventually phased out), so it's no easy calculation when the lower power consumption of a new PC will offset all this.

I've set myself a power-limit of about 600 Watt that I will allow my mini-farm to consume 24/7/365. This will produce ca. 1.5 metric tons of CO2 each year, which is maybe 15% of the per-capita CO2 emission of an average German (or 100% that of an inhabitant of Costa Rica...). I do participate in CPDN also :-).

(per capita CO2 emissions based on 2004 figures, see here)

CU
H-B

tullio
tullio
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RE: RE: The cost of

Message 69826 in response to message 69825

Quote:
Quote:

The cost of electricity is not really a factor that concerns me. The environmental consequences are far more troubling and that factor rather than dollars is much more likely to stem my profligacy. :).

Interesting question: buying a new PC carries an environmental price tag as well (CO2 emissions & chemical waste for production, and costs related to the disposal of the unit when it's eventually phased out), so it's no easy calculation when the lower power consumption of a new PC will offset all this.

I've set myself a power-limit of about 600 Watt that I will allow my mini-farm to consume 24/7/365. This will produce ca. 1.5 metric tons of CO2 each year, which is maybe 15% of the per-capita CO2 emission of an average German (or 100% that of an inhabitant of Costa Rica...). I do participate in CPDN also :-).

(per capita CO2 emissions based on 2004 figures, see here)

CU
H-B


Yes, but also methane and N2O (nitrogen protoxide) contribute to global warming. They are produced by farming, breeding pigs and other livestock, vulcans and also by catalytic converters (N2O). CO2 is not the only culprit.
Tullio

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
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RE: RE: RE: The cost

Message 69827 in response to message 69826

Quote:
Quote:
Quote:

The cost of electricity is not really a factor that concerns me. The environmental consequences are far more troubling and that factor rather than dollars is much more likely to stem my profligacy. :).

Interesting question: buying a new PC carries an environmental price tag as well (CO2 emissions & chemical waste for production, and costs related to the disposal of the unit when it's eventually phased out), so it's no easy calculation when the lower power consumption of a new PC will offset all this.

I've set myself a power-limit of about 600 Watt that I will allow my mini-farm to consume 24/7/365. This will produce ca. 1.5 metric tons of CO2 each year, which is maybe 15% of the per-capita CO2 emission of an average German (or 100% that of an inhabitant of Costa Rica...). I do participate in CPDN also :-).

(per capita CO2 emissions based on 2004 figures, see here)

CU
H-B


Yes, but also methane and N2O (nitrogen protoxide) contribute to global warming. They are produced by farming, breeding pigs and other livestock, vulcans and also by catalytic converters (N2O). CO2 is not the only culprit.
Tullio

Indeed, so theoretically we crunchers could make up for some of the extra CO2 emissions we cause by eating less beef, pork, and rice (seriously!!). I picked CO2 because it seems to be the most relevant measure for the environmental impact of electricity consumption, at least for countries where fossil fuel plays a major role here.

Here in Germany providers of electricity are required to specify how much CO2 per kWh they generate. In order not to let nuclear power come out so favorable, also the amount of nuclear waste per kWh must be reported.

CU
H-B

tullio
tullio
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RE: Indeed, so

Message 69828 in response to message 69827

Quote:


Indeed, so theoretically we crunchers could make up for some of the extra CO2 emissions we cause by eating less beef, pork, and rice (seriously!!). I picked CO2 because it seems to be the most relevant measure for the environmental impact of electricity consumption, at least for countries where fossil fuel plays a major role here.

Here in Germany providers of electricity are required to specify how much CO2 per kWh they generate. In order not to let nuclear power come out so favorable, also the amount of nuclear waste per kWh must be reported.

CU
H-B


But you are far ahead of us in photovoltaics. A lot of Sole mio is wasted in our sunny land.

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
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And wind energy... In Germany

And wind energy... In Germany we have far more wind than sunshine :-/.

CU
H-B

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
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Hi

Message 69830 in response to message 69820

Hi Gary,

Quote:

Having seen Bikeman's IBM boxes, I've been paying more attention to IBM eservers xSeries and now have about ten of those to play with. Five are now in production and I feel I've mastered at least some of the quirks of getting them to perform nicely.


Amazing. I'm quite satisfied with my two x330 boxes, they tend do have RAC around 430. One of them is now my central E@H server which also runs a database and a little proxy written in Java that intercepts results from all other hosts in the LAN before they are sent to the E@H server so I can visualize them.

Maybe I'll upgrade it with some more RAM if I can find some at bargain price. AFAIK I don't even need "low profile" modules because they are mounted in slots that are not upright but at some slope.

Quote:

At that rate of change I'm not looking forward to the times for __4, __3, __2, __1 and __0. I think I saw someone mentioning that the __0 result was always the slowest in the sequence.


Yup, that seems to be true.

Quote:

Not too shabby for someone else's junk :).

Not at all.

Gary, do you still make up host names for your farm or is it all just 192.168.* ;-)

CU
H-B

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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Hi Jim, Thanks for all

Message 69831 in response to message 69822

Hi Jim,

Thanks for all your comments. Sounds like we both think along the same lines as far as servers are concerned.

Quote:
....
The only draw back I've found is their weight and size....

Yep, but once you've found a place to stack them up they tend not to be a problem as long as you don't ever want to shift them around too much :). Because of the nature of the cases, they stack particularly well.

Quote:
What I do like is that they are tough, easy to work on, and parts/upgrades are cheap! That, and they have features you'd never find in a desktop. Things like memory mirroring, RAID memory, ChipKill, 2 or 4 way interleave on memory, hot swap PCI-X cards, hot swap power supplies and HDD's, ..... Best of all, they are designed to run full tilt 24/7/365.

Exactly my thoughts as well. Initially, I thought you might need to apply power to both hot swap PSUs that are in most of my machines. I figured that the extra PSU was just a live spare which would really only be needed in mission critical situations. So I've been powering the first PSU only and so far have not had any problems. I figure there must be some wastage of electricity by keeping the extra PSU always on line and that wastage would add up over a large number of machines.

The server stacks get very warm, particularly as I'm not using aircon to maintain a normal office temperature. I reckon ambient is at least 30 - 35C most of the time and case temperature around 45-50C. Even under these somewhat extreme conditions, the servers seem to be rock solid whilst a few desktops aren't :). The last six months have been cool enough to get away with this here in sub-tropical Brisbane, Australia but full summer is rapidly approaching so I'll probably need to start shutting some machines down shortly.

Cheers,
Gary.

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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RE: Do you have the

Message 69832 in response to message 69824

Quote:
Do you have the oportunity to double or treble your electric bill to use green energy then?

I'm not really aware of how easy or not it is to sign up for green energy or, if it is possible here, what the costs might actually be. Double or treble seems a bit high to me. I would probably choose to shut down machines if the cost rose by a factor of three. If the cost were something like 50% more for "green" energy, I would certainly consider it, but probably with a somewhat skeptical eye. Human nature being what it is, I would want to be convinced about the true "greenness" of green energy.

Most Australians are probably only just starting to get really concerned at the rate at which the planet is being denuded of forests and the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels. This is probably because we have strongly been against the nuclear option and have simply allowed ourselves the luxury of using our staggering reserves of coal without really understanding the consequences. That is now rapidly changing and the nuclear debate has started again and will probably heat up considerably over the next couple of years.

For me personally, I'm hoping for breakthroughs in photo-voltaic collectors and systems where you can pump energy back into the grid during the day and draw what you need at night. I really haven't checked where we are with that lately so maybe I'm just pipe dreaming.

Cheers,
Gary.

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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RE: Maybe I'll upgrade it

Message 69833 in response to message 69830

Quote:

Maybe I'll upgrade it with some more RAM if I can find some at bargain price. AFAIK I don't even need "low profile" modules because they are mounted in slots that are not upright but at some slope.

No, you don't need anything special for RAM - any PC133 registered SDRAM will be fine. You have a total of 4 slots so if your current 512MB is not made up of 128MB sticks, you should have at least two free. I also have an X330 machine so I know exactly what you mean by the slots at a slope :). I think most 1U boxes use that technique so that stick profile is not an issue.

Quote:
Gary, do you still make up host names for your farm or is it all just 192.168.* ;-)

I give each machine a unique hostname which, with other details, gets recorded on a post-it note and stuck to the case. For example, I have 11 HP Netserver E800 dual PIII 1.0G machines which have hostnames from netserv-01 to netserv-11 respectively. I record on each post-it note, the non-routable IP address together with details about FSB, RAM and HDD sizes and overclocking information if appropriate (not usually with servers). 10 of these form a 2 wide by 5 high stack (each box has a standard tower case format). So, 20 CPUs for a minimum of floor space and I can reach up to the topmost pair to plug in keyboard mouse and video cables occasionally if needed.

Cheers,
Gary.

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