BOINC Exceeds 2 Petaflop/s Barrier 114
Posted
by
kdawson
from the faster-faster-for-science dept.
from the faster-faster-for-science dept.
Myrrh writes "Though an official announcement has not yet been made, it would appear that the BOINC project as a whole has exceeded two petaflop/s performance. The top page features this legend: '24-hour average: 2,793.53 TeraFLOPS.' According to last month's Top500 list of supercomputers, BOINC's performance is now beating that of the fastest supercomputer, RoadRunner, by more than a factor of two (with the caveat that BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack)."
I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 output.. (Score:2, Interesting)
A good question to ask is how many kWh were consumed for that computing output.
Since they know what CPUs are running on every BOINC client and the thermal power of them are generally known, it should be possible to calculate...
Botnets (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering a spherical cow: 140 tons/hour CO2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets say a typical computer running BOINC contributes 1 GFlop at 100W (1e2W). So at 2e6 GFlops, tats 2e8W or 2e5 kW.
According to the energy department, we can assume that 1.4 pounds of CO2 per KWh, so that says BOINC is at ~3e5 pounds/hour of CO2, or about 140 tons/hour of CO2.
I get a very similar number if I back of the envelope what a coal plant should be based on ~500 tons/1 GW.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2report.html [doe.gov]
How cost effective is this really? (Score:3, Interesting)
BOINC uses 571,534 computers. The indirect cost of supporting and maintaing the software, hardware, etc is borne by the volunteers but it still has to be paid.
Additionally, they claim it uses between $3 and $8 a month extra in energy in the US*, and double to triple that in Europe.
* This number is poorly derived. They based it on an 'average' electrical rate in the US, e.g. it looks like they added up all the rates and divided by 50. The average American however pays more than the average rate, because the majority live in the dense states where electricity costs most. Florida, New York, Caifornia, etc vs the relatively tiny populations in North Dakota where electricity is cheap.
Further, I'm confident that the skew is weighted towards broadband users, which further skews things away from rural North Dakota where electricity is cheap.
Further, they fail to account the extra cooling required as a result of generating more heat. Granted in -some- places where you need more heat this will offset your heating bill in your favor, but again, most people are clustered in areas that require more cooling than heating.
So, bottom line, I'd say their assessment of electrical costs is on the low side.
For the sake of argument, lets say it averaged out to 10$/mo. (Including europe.) What kind of computing power could you build and run with $5.7M/month.
Especially when you have the freedom to install it where you want, and factoring in that industrial electricity is cheaper than residential. With a $68M/year budget, could you beat boinc?
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:4, Interesting)
Once that's done, we can do a comparative analysis of CO2 of all the machines machines running WoW (factoring in the increased power draw of a machine with a higher end video card, plus increased disk & memory I/O compared to a machine running BOINC). I'd be willing to be the BOINC 24x7x365 number works out to be smaller, or at least on par with a WoW machine going 4 hours a night several times a week.
Waste is, and will always be, a relative term.
Re:Still far behind... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Missed opportunity (Score:2, Interesting)