This will no doubt elicit a mixed response, but feel compelled to bring an important issue to the attention of Dr. Baker and the Project as a whole. With Global Warming/Dimming and the problems involving excessive Carbon Dioxide emmisions, we must out of concience consider how our Computers are being used. This is not a comment about the Projects worth or suggest Project termination, but simply to state our machines should not be running for the Projects sake. The temptation to leave machines running in order to achieve a higher statistical average is real given our competitive nature. Let's consider how expensive leaving Computers on is and what the "Real" costs are. Thanks

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This will no doubt elicit a mixed response, but feel compelled to bring an important issue to the attention of Dr. Baker and the Project as a whole. With Global Warming/Dimming and the problems involving excessive Carbon Dioxide emmisions, we must out of concience consider how our Computers are being used. This is not a comment about the Projects worth or suggest Project termination, but simply to state our machines should not be running for the Projects sake. The temptation to leave machines running in order to achieve a higher statistical average is real given our competitive nature. Let's consider how expensive leaving Computers on is and what the "Real" costs are. Thanks

HUmmyes i suppose leaveing your machine running can cost some energy and it can run up to large numbers with thousands of computers doing it. But lets look at the realistic point of view. The hundreds of kilowatts a day all these computers use is a drop in the barrel. More So called green house gasses are dumped into the atmosphere everyday buy south american farmers burning off the rain forrest for farm land than by all the computers used on this system in a year. Add to that all the 2nd and 3rd world nations that dont have clean air acts.
Just a few examples take Japan they use the high sulphere content oil from the Alaskan pipeline project. China uses what ever Oil they can buy to produce thier fuel.

We wont even get into the questionable science of global warming. As at best we truley only have accurate temrature records going back for at best 70 years . Anything before that is used with thermometers that had questionable gradiant scales.

I might point to a Discovery channel documentry that was called Little ice age big chill. Which realy brings the questions home about so called global warming. There is no doubt that man does play a role in it but the numbers dont pan out.

Considering in the late12th century England had better wines than France and had a better temprate zone for it. But as the 1300s came to a close the tempratures dropped up to 3 to5 degrees Ending this cycle even into the mid 1870s there was a definate cool trend.

Does the earths weather have a set cycle? I would say yes. Does mankind have a effect on it there a signs showing we do. But there are thousands of outside variables from sun spot activity to solar dust clouds to magnetic storms and the list goes on.

So the small amount of green house gases caused are more than worht while. Who is to say that 1 of these protien folds might not actuly be abreak through that allows mankind to develope a system to address green house gases.

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This is on ClimatePrediction.net's FAQ:

Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the climateprediction.net project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of electrical energy.

That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Let's use a tiny bit of physics to do it. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the climateprediction.net project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea!

Is five and a half million cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council, some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!!!

Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the climateprediction.net project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.

Assuming you are convinced this experiment needs to be done, there are basically two options: to buy a hangar-full of PCs and run it ourselves (not even an option right now, since the climate research community doesn't have the resources); or to recycle spare CPU out in the community, as we propose to do under the climateprediction.net experiment. Since the main environmental impact of a PC is in manufacture and disposal, not the power consumed in running it (never mind the air-conditioning costs and visual impact of that hangar on some innocent rural community), environmentalists will, we hope, approve of our strategy.

Nevertheless, this would be an interesting topic for further discussion, and we warmly invite you to go to the interactive parts of this portal and make your voice and/or opinion heard in the climateprediction.net community. See also the question on joining the user community further down.

Heres the url: http://www.climateprediction.net/info/part_faq.php#q3.1
Edit: Added url.

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snip, snip
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Let's consider how expensive leaving Computers on is and what the "Real" costs are. Thanks

Preach at Seti @ home.

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dag
--Finding aliens is cool, but understanding the structure of proteins is useful.

This thread has been moved from the Science forum

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Thanks for the info, which helps clear things up.

I'd also like to add that many companies with 1000s of PCs leave their computers running 24/7, so that software upgrades and configs can be performed off-hours. Now *that* could be considered as waste of resources.

But for a science project like Rosetta, it is definately worthwhile to leave the PCs running 24/7, in my case.

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Best UFO Resources
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How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity

If you'd like to make some positive impact on the Co2 levels, perhaps team up with the Arbor Day folks and encourage everyone using a computer to plant a tree each year. And if you're worried about the Methane production, there's always limiting the cow population.

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