Re: [BLUG] NOV meeting topic

At the OLF, maddog gave a presentation about computing and power
consumption. Interesting numbers game: At 350 watts per computer, in
order to double the number of personal computers on the planet
(1,000,000,000), we would need to build 25 power plants with output
equal to the single largest power plant we have today.

As a geek with hippy tendencies, this has made me start thinking about
how to make computing more earth-friendly. There are quite a few
projects/business ventures going on right now that are working on
that. The OLPC for one, and the nifty little Koolu boxes for another.

I think the ideal would probably be ultra-power-efficient massive
back-end servers and solid-state, fanless, maybe even PoE-fed
thin-client front ends.

The other thing I see as a big possibility would be to have beefier
thin-client front-ends that contribute to the processor requirements
of the whole system through an OpenMosix-style back-end pool of
processor time.

So in a building of 300 connected workstations, the whole building
would have 300 workstations worth of processor power. If you're only
using a word processor or a browser or an e-mail client or something,
your idle processor time would be up for someone else's use. But say
you're trying to render 3-d graphics or fold proteins or something
that can use as much processor time as it can get, you could then
start enlisting the idle processor time of all your neighbors for your
task.

What do you think? Silly or workable?

Simón

On 10/10/07, jtwelty@indiana.edu <jtwelty@indiana.edu> wrote:
> According to the specs, the typical processor power consumption is 95
> watts; up to 123 watts... pretty efficient.
>
> Quoting Simón Ruiz <simon.a.ruiz@gmail.com>:
>
> > Out of curiosity, how expensive is this set up, and how much power
> > does it draw?
> >
> > On 10/9/07, jtwelty@indiana.edu <jtwelty@indiana.edu> wrote:
> >> Sun Blade T6320 with 8 cores - 64 threads, 64 GB memory, 176 Gbps I/O
> >> throughput, 10 GbE networking.
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> >
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