[NCLUG] Re: "Green" power

[Sean Reifschneider]

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 01:29:20PM -0600, danbob wrote:
>> in the USA are 9.5 percent, between the power plant and your electric

Good point, as is John's about heat pumps being more effective (as opposed
to efficient).  As Chad says, as compared to some other methods of heating,
that 9.5% is hitting you in either case.

> of your electric furnace to that of your computer's tendency to turn
> electric power into heat, I would think.

One thing about electric heat is that it tends to be much easier to
spot-heat.  Where a heat pump dramatically drops in efficiency if you close
the registers in rooms that you aren't using, electric heat you can easily
use to heat just where you need it.  If your Folding computers happen to be
close to where you want the heat, that may be a good thing.

I have had fairly good success with keeping the house thermostat lower, and
using spot heating to increase the comfort level where I am if I feel like
I need it.  A mug of tea can be quite effective (and maybe even efficient,
I haven't really thought about it :-) for this.

John's idea of providing money you would otherwise spend on power to help
F at H build a power efficient supercomputer is interesting, but as far as I
know the only way you can currently do that is by setting up a local F at H
client and running it and paying for the power.  Is there someplace you can
contribute direct funds to F at H for them to put folding machines on-line?
Because if there isn't, it may be an efficient suggestion but not very
effective.  :-)

However, even in that case I'm not sure it really saves that much power.
Personally, at least half of my work-units come from systems that would be
up anyway, so the real cost isn't what it costs to run that machine for a
year, but the difference between that it costs to run it when idle or
largely idle and what it costs to run it with F at H.

This, of course, depends on your power savings settings.  My laptop when it
runs F at H runs it at only 800MHz, unless I kick off something else that's
fairly heavy CPU, where it pushes it up to 2.5GHz.  So there is some tuning
you can do there as well...  In that case, running F at H may not cost you
anything more than what you'd otherwise be paying.

Of course, that's not true with my PS3...  I really have no need for it
being on the remainder of the time except when running F at H.  2 of the other
machines I'm running at home for folding are on all the time anyway because
one is acting as a server I use all the time and the other is a server I
use regularly.  The first is consolidated down from a pair of servers, and
is running the most efficient power supply I could find, so I've made some
movement towards improved efficiency...

It would be pretty awesome to set up an off-the-grid F at H system though...
Perhaps there would be some interest in having danbob or someone give a
presentation on something like that?

Sean
-- 
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability

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