It's fall (US) Turn down that furnace and heat your home with Folding@home

[840quadra]

With the fall chill starting to set in for my part of the US, I have now resumed GPU folding at my home to help offset some of my heating costs, and to contribute to a good cause. Additionally, I hope to refrain from turning on my furnace until December this year, if at all possible ( quite a task in Minnesota )



So why fold in fall / winter?

For me, I dislike paying to heat my entire house to a comfortable temperature, and tend to reduce my living space to smaller / cozy spots in my home. Aditionally, I keep the central air down to a minimum ( okay 58 degrees F), and have an i7 dual GPU gaming tower that is setup to fold in my office / den that does a great job of keeping that part of my home nice and toasty. In the end, my overall cost savings is minimal, however I feel better about spot heating my home, and donating to a good cause.

While I don't do this myself, there are some advanced folders who have linked their systems to thermostats, and have them set to fold depending on preset temperatures, essentially turning their computers into advanced automated furnaces.

If you can, offer some spare CPU cycles to the cause this winter, please do! And if you can, turn down that thermostat in your house, and warm your home with the power of folding!

If you are interested in joining the fold, be sure to check out the posted faq.

Linked here

 

[128keaton]

Hey, coming over from the PowerPC forum. I've been using BOINC to heat up the upstairs of my house. When it gets a little chillier, I might break out the G5 and place it at the opposite end of the house doing video encoding/BOINC. I would fold, but there are no more folding jobs for PowerPC Macs .

 

[flyrod]

I'm in the same situation here: only PPC hardware. I sometimes run distributed.net in the winters.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

Yeah, a dual GPU last year fully replaced my heater in the bed room ...

 

[840quadra]

I'm in the same situation here: only PPC hardware. I sometimes run distributed.net in the winters.

Hey, coming over from the PowerPC forum. I've been using BOINC to heat up the upstairs of my house. When it gets a little chillier, I might break out the G5 and place it at the opposite end of the house doing video encoding/BOINC. I would fold, but there are no more folding jobs for PowerPC Macs .

I think it was a mistake to remove PPC since that closed out many still valid processors out in the wild. Granted their algorithm was far from efficient on PPC, it was still computational power that could assist with the cause. That said, I understand that there may be a lot of development cost in the background, and PPC (for the Macintosh at least), is a discontinued product, which Stanford Students would have no benefit (in career) learning how to code into.

It would be neat to see the overall Distributed compute power throughout all of the applications people choose here on MacRumors, and, would be AWESOME to see more contribute.

I bet Thousands of members on here have a system that is powered up 24/7, and I can also imagine that it would be considerable power to help with whatever project they would want to run.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

Now since 2000 hours my Android Nexus is folding, but would not bring me over the winter without a severe cold

 

[128keaton]

I think it was a mistake to remove PPC since that closed out many still valid processors out in the wild. Granted their algorithm was far from efficient on PPC, it was still computational power that could assist with the cause. That said, I understand that there may be a lot of development cost in the background, and PPC (for the Macintosh at least), is a discontinued product, which Stanford Students would have no benefit (in career) learning how to code into.

It would be neat to see the overall Distributed compute power throughout all of the applications people choose here on MacRumors, and, would be AWESOME to see more contribute.

I bet Thousands of members on here have a system that is powered up 24/7, and I can also imagine that it would be considerable power to help with whatever project they would want to run.

Like I mentioned above, BOINC by Berkeley has plenty of PowerPC work

 

[840quadra]

Like I mentioned above, BOINC by Berkeley has plenty of PowerPC work

Indeed, it's why I said it would be neat to see a metric of all the distributed projects people are running on MacRumors.

 

[flyrod]

It is disappointing. If they code for linux it should be just a couple different compiler options to build for PPC. And as for educational merit of compiling for PPC, I think something like half of the top 10 super computers in the world are still PPC.