Mar 19, 2008 1:34 pm US/Pacific
Don't Waste That Downtime!
John DeFore
March 14, 2008
We all know computers consume a lot of electricity (particularly older ones, which can rival electric heaters as juice-hogs) and should be shut down when not in use. After years of pressure, manufacturers are competing to work better power management systems into PCs, and a small market has developed for devices, like smartly designed power strips, that help users make sure gear they think they've shut down has actually stopped drawing power.
But what about those hours of the day when computers need to be running but aren't actively in use? As we all learn in school when we write our first term papers, much "work time" is spent staring at a blank screen. Isn't it a shame we waste so much energy keeping our processors humming while we wait for inspiration?
Actually, all those billions of wasted processor cycles could be put to good use. While your computer waits for you to formulate an eloquent thesis sentence or to receive an important email, it could be busy solving some of the world's great problems, from mathematical imponderables to global epidemics and the diseases that afflict us.
That's thanks to a brilliant breed of screensavers built around the principle of "distributed computing," also called "volunteer computing."
With distributed computing, projects involving enormously complex sets of calculations are taken away from the room-filling supercomputers that once worked on them, broken into manageable little chunks, and sent to thousands or millions of personal computers around the world. When a participant stops using her computer for a while, instead of seeing the swimming fish or psychedelic fractals of a traditional screensaver, she watches as her processor becomes one cog in a vast, amorphous machine — a "cloud" of computing power, as some describe it.
The granddaddy of these applications is SETI@Home, which uses participants' computing time to look for aliens. Data gathered by banks of radio telescopes is parceled out to individual users, whose CPUs sift through it in search of patterns that might indicate transmissions from intelligent life forms on other planets.
A bit of the program's documentation explains the vastness of its computing needs: "More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power." It also describes the inadequacy of once-cutting-edge supercomputers to this task: "The most powerful computer, IBM's ASCI White, is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS [a measurement of mathematical operations per second] and costs $110 million. SETI@home currently gets about 15 TeraFLOPs and has cost $500K so far."
SETI@home was born in the late Nineties, and was quickly adopted by young techies for whom finding extraterrestrial life sounded impossibly cool. A decade later, those who find this quest far-fetched or frivolous have options. A wide array of distributed computing projects have been launched (see some lists here and here), tackling everything from chess problems to scientific issues of immense real-world importance.
Of particular interest to Green Right Now readers is a collaborative effort directed at "ensemble forecasting" of the Earth's climate, which runs through endless models visualizing climate change, each based on slightly different parameters. The goal is to sort useful models from those that don't hold up against known data, offering policy makers the best possible guess on issues that are inherently speculative.
An umbrella site called AFRICA@home was established to focus on various issues facing that continent. Their current project, MalariaControl.net studies the various ways malaria can be transmitted in order to devise the best strategies to control it.
Fighting disease, in fact, appears to be the most popular use of distributed computing. A surprising number of projects (like Predictor and Rosetta) have been launched to analyze the way proteins within the body "fold," a process that, when it goes awry, causes diseases from cancer to Mad Cow Disease.
A newcomer to this arena might ask why so many protein-folding projects exist. If the power of distributed computing lies in its ability to cobble near-infinite resources toward a single academic goal, why don't the teams join forces? Prof. Vijay S. Pande, director of the Folding@home project, explains. Of the three leading protein-centered projects, he says, "Rosetta and Predictor are the most similar" in that "they try to predict the final structure" of a protein once it has been folded.
"In my opinion," Pande continues, "that's still something best done experimentally" — in the physical world, that is, outside of computer models. "Folding@home is different in that it's studying the process of folding and misfolding" — not trying to model the end result — "especially as it's relevant to diseases such as Alzheimer's." Since different kinds of mis-folding lead to different diseases, Pande's team has narrowed its focus to the mis-folds that cause Alzheimer's, interested not simply in understanding the disease "but even in coming up with small-molecule drugs to fight it."
That explains the multiplicity of protein-studying teams. But once computer owners have decided which project they want to support, a nagging environmental question lingers: Won't making your computer do more work use more electricity?
Well, yes. David Anderson, director of BOINC — the software platform, built at the University of California, Berkeley, upon which most distributed computing projects rely — acknowledges that "relative to being idle, it's an increase of about 50 watts." While Anderson offers one circumstance in which there's no environmental impact ("For people living in cold places who use electric heat, volunteer computing can be energy-neutral, since their PC is acting as a heater."), the bottom line is that there is a cost. The Folding team estimates that for a participant paying California utility rates "the difference between an idled computer and one running F@H would be close to $4 a month - and if the computer was already being used 8 hours a day, it would be closer to $3 a month."
Individuals will have to decide for themselves which makes more sense for the planet: minimizing the energy used by their computer down-time but accepting that it is 100% waste, or allowing their computers to use a little more power in pursuit of answers to the most pressing questions facing us today. One thing is certain: Using a computer's downtime to draw geometric eye candy or to present slideshows of cute animals isn't the answer.
- For more information on how to volunteer your computer for humanitarian or science-related projects see the listings of current projects on the BOINC website which doesn't endorse particular programs, but maintains links to ongoing work by academic and industry-based groups such as IBM's World Community Grid. which supports research on AIDS, cancer, Muscular Dystrophy and Dengue Feve
(Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media)
