I want to let you all know about what I think is one of the coolest yet most under-appreciated ways to reduce waste and improve one’s impact on the world.

A bit of background first: Every watt of electricity you use in your house turns into heat. A blender is just as efficient at turning electricity into heat as a space heater. It sounds counter-intuitive, but ask your grade school physics teacher and you’ll find that the conservation of energy is not a controversial topic in physics. If you have electric heat such as electric baseboards or space heaters (NOT heat pumps since they are >100% efficient), you can heat your house with computers and spend the exact same amount as your normal heat bill but also get some useful computational work done in the process. If you are spending 50W on a space heater, you could instead dump that 50W into your computer. You pay for and get 50W of heat either way, but only the computer does some work along the way.

So really, if you are pouring electricity into a space heater or electric baseboard heater, it’s a waste, because that same electricity could be doing some useful work.

What kind of work? Well, I donate my computer’s time to BOINC. BOINC lemmy at [email protected] . (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a free and open-source program that has been around for decades and has delivered teraflops of computing to scientists on a daily basis for absolutely free. It runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, even Android (just be careful about heat on Android!). You don’t need to be computer-savvy to run it.

BOINC has been used to map the universe, detect asteroids, search for aliens (remember seti@home?), fight cancer, and publish hundreds of scientific papers. The world’s largest particle accelerator (large hadron collider at CERN) even has a project you can compute for, who knows, you may find a new subatomic particle! Anybody with a computer, raspberry pi, or android can contribute their CPU or GPU to the cause and pick which projects they want to contribute to.

One of the awesome things about BOINC is that any scientists with interesting research can instantly access massive amounts of computational power for free. They don’t need time on a supercomputer or institutional backing, all they need is an interesting research concept and a spare laptop to run the server on.

I have been running BOINC for many years and find it very gratifying, I love getting to see the results. In winter, 100% of my indoor heat comes from computing for science.

  • ruffslEnglish
    9•9 months ago

    Any details on your setup?

    1. Do you use any ventilation to circulate the heated air through home?
    • E.g. do you place them in the basement and rely on raising connection l convention of heat, or dispersed around your living spaces?
    1. What scale of computing hardware do you host?
    • Retired server racks into a home lab?
    1. What grade of insulation is your home, the scale of the household?
    • built for what kind of winter climate zone in your geography?

    Thanks!

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      4•9 months ago
      1. No. I have a several room apartment split into several “zones” for heating purposes and the heat moves around enough without needing to manually move the air. In deep winter I basically have everything with a plug I can get my hands on plugged into the wall. During more milder parts, I’ll turn on/off stuff as I leave rooms and I have all the machines tied to a thermostat script so they never run if the room gets too warm. The house’s native heat is just electric baseboard heaters. With the layout of my apartment they are actually kind of a pain as you can’t put anything near them for fire hazard reasons, so almost all of them are turned off permanently so I don’t have to worry about that.
      2. A pretty random mix of desktop PCs w/ GPUs, SBCs, androids, and some laptops. The androids I leave on even in summer, they sip electricity and are crazy efficient in terms of computation per watt. Some motherboards are just running out in the open with no case because why not. Lots is hardware I’ve picked up for free from people who didn’t want it anymore. Some of it has problems or is quite old but works for the purposes of generating heat and doing science. I’ve played around w some servers but the noise is just not something that can be worked around especially for the 1U ones. I really want to set up a fish tank full of mineral oil one year and dunk a bunch of my equipment into there and experiment with that, I’ve seen some really interesting stats on efficiency gains doing that.
      3. Honestly I have no idea about the insulation grade, seems pretty good compared to previous places I’ve lived. Fairly moderate climate, but it below freezing here for a good couple months. I turn off my rigs once it warms up though my main computer crunches BOINC year round as it has to be on most of the time anyways.
      4. I should probably also add that many of my rigs are underclocked to some degree. Absolutely not a thing you have to do, they are 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat either way, but most CPUs and GPUs actually hit their peak computation-per-watt efficiency somewhere between 60-80% of maximum clock speed. I’ve never messed around with undervolting but I know some people do.