2500 Machines at my disposal...

[Mcgilligan]

Hi, I am really new to distributed/grid computing and i am looking for a way to earn some cash. Does anyone know of any projects out there (besides Ubero) that are willing to pay for my unused cycles? Also, it is not me that would be getting the money, but rather i work for a school district that has a very tight technology budget and this money would go towards upgrading hardware. The machines vary in specs, but almost all of them are 2.4 ghz P4s with atleast 512 megs of ram, and we have about 2500 machines in the district. Also, can anyone refer me to some sort of "calculator" that will tell me the predicted performance of these machines if they were to be combined into a cluster.

[LAURENU2]

I think Ubero is the last one standing
But maybe jasong from here would rent some of the computers to run DC

If not join us and put them to good use

[jasong]

I think Ubero is the last one standing
But maybe jasong from here would rent some of the computers to run DC

If not join us and put them to good use
2500 computers is a little beyond my meager budget, lol.

I"ll be back with a helpful link in about 10 minutes. Try here. (http://www.computepower.com/)

How much are you willing to micromanage these PCs? Because I'm sure there are a lot of people running BOINC that might be willing to rent time on one of those P4s. In my opinion, you should come up with a base rate, say that people have to rent in chunks of 4 weeks, and try to get some big spenders.

This could take up a lot of your time, so don't be afraid to ask for a percentage if this works out well.

Edit: (Hopefully, my last edit of this busy post) How many watts of power does the computer use when the cpu is at 100%? Most Distributed Computing projects run the cpus at 100%, so you should charge at least 10-30% more than whatever the power draw is. Also, you have to worry about fan noise. You can either throttle the computer, making it use less than 100% cpu, or make it only run at night.

Can you run the computers from a central location? That would be really beneficial, since there would be less legwork. If you can manage from a central location, then you can control the "fleet" better.

[Mcgilligan]

Hey guys, sorry about the time it took for me to reply. Jasong, i checked your link out, and I was hoping that I would be able to do something more along the lines of what Ubero did, and that is just basically download a client, log in with a username and get paid, lol. I also spoke with our Director of Technology and he had asked that i just start out with maybe just a lab or two before we would go district-wide just to tread the waters. I was also wrong about the numbers, the majority of our district is actually Dell GX620s that are P4 HT 3.0 Ghz and the rest are gx260s that are P4 2.4 Ghz. I found that the power draw on the 620s to be about 130 watts max and the cost of electricity around here is about 10 cents per kWh. So im guessing the price to use a machine should probably be about 25 cents an hour? And if i am unable to find a way to make any money off of this, I think we could convince the school board to allow us to use them for cancer research. Any ideas on an easy way we could set that up somehow by using PXE to push down a linux cluster distro along with the client? Thanks for your help guys.

[em99010pepe]

I don't think you are going to be paid for running a distributed computing project.
The only project I see you can earn something is GIMPS (http://www.mersenne.org/) but you need to find a prime number.

Carlos

[alpha]

That's not strictly true. See here (http://www.distributedcomputing.info/faq.html#2.1).

Also, as Carlos mentioned, some projects offer a reward for a particular feat.

[jasong]

I found that the power draw on the 620s to be about 130 watts max and the cost of electricity around here is about 10 cents per kWh. So im guessing the price to use a machine should probably be about 25 cents an hour?
Way, WAAAY too much. 130 watts means it uses 130 watts an hour, 130 times 24 hours is 3120, or 3.12 kilowatts, so 31 cents a day. If you charge more than 60 cents a day, people will most likely go elsewhere or build their own computers. Additionally, if you need to cool the room, you need to add anywhere from 0-50% to get rid of the heat caused by the computers.

2500 computers at 31 cents a day is $775, so it's an additional drain on the budget.

I'm going to attempt to do some research on what those computers are capable of. I might be able to find some people who want to rent their power.

[jasong]

One thing you may not have thought of was the possibility of renting bandwidth. There are projects, like Majestic-12, that rely on users bandwidth, as well as computing power. Even if you only ran them at night, so as not to interfere with the school stuff, you could achieve some serious numbers, possibly numbers that people want to rent.

on another note, I'm attempting to determine if 60 cents a day is worthwhile to have these computers on one of the prime finding projects. After the cost of electricity, that's about 20 cents a day, which isn't bad. The question is whether it's worthwhile.

[Mcgilligan]

Like i said, im new to DC so i don't know much like how the points systems work for the projects and what not. If i could find a probability of what the chances would be of finding a 10 million digit prime using all 2500 machines or just a lab or two and see if it were worthwhile, then maybe i can get some "clearance" from the board so that we could run the machines at 100% during non-school hours. As for the bandwidth, i'm not exactly sure on what the numbers are, but i know it is well over 100 Mbps. Our ISP is Expediant Communications. Thanks alot for your help everybody!

[Scoofy12]

jasong i think youre getting your units confused. A watt is a unit of power, that is energy per time, there are no "watts per hour." instead you are charged per kilowatt-hour (kw * hours). but you are right about the price, 3.1kwh per day per machine or 31 cents.... unfortunately mcgilligan owns the most power hungry commodity CPUs in existence.

i kind of doubt youll find an easy way to get money from those from public DC projects, although there are some private services (like sun's big grid thing) that rent CPU time, maybe you can get in on that... at any rate i expect it will take a fair amount of effort if you wanted money.

as for free DC projects (no pun intended), you might have a look at BOINC based projects, BOINC lets you set preferences like what things are allowed to run and when (eg school hours) and even what percent of the cpu they use, to manage power/heat, and even better, you set these preferences via the web for all your computers at once. there are many worthwhile projects there. i can't think of any doing cancer off the top of my head (see http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php ) but there are several doing biology/diseas research. Many of us here at free-DC do rosetta and proteins, which are very relevant for disease research.

hope that's helpful

[riptide]

Has any DC project really actually paid out cash for crunching.

[LAURENU2]

Has any DC project really actually paid out cash for crunching.
Well Yes and No
Peer paid you to run there Web testing program
It was DC in a way, but not as we know it now

[Amaroque]

Has any DC project really actually paid out cash for crunching.

Only Prime95, that I know of.

[jasong]

Only Prime95, that I know of.
Technically, Prime95 simply helped to win the money. Any other similar project could've beat them to it. It remains to be seen whether it will be a Prime95 user who wins the $100,000 for a 10 million-digit prime.