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Imagine a place where your trusty old computer can continue to compute long after its components
have become obsolete. A place where the machine that you played
solitaire on for hours now works out complex calculations, instead of being shipped to China for questionable recycling.
The Alameda County Computer
Resource Center (ACCRC,)
where "obsolescence is just a lack of imagination," has combined two of
our favorite things, vegetable oil and old computers, in order to
create something rather surprising: supercomputers.
During MAKE: Magazine's
Maker Faire in San Mateo this past summer, ACCRC collected old
computers, clustered them and powered them using their own
vegetable-oil fueled generator. CNET donated a dual-processor 1 GHz
Pentium III server for them to use as their master node. The slave
nodes consisted entirely of discarded old computers collected during
the Maker Faire. The software ACCRC used for their supercomputer
was a modified version of ParallelKnoppix, which is a GNU/Linux Live
CD.
The cluster from the Maker
Faire consisted of 31 PCs with a sum total processing power of 22.7 GHz and an average
733 MHz per node. Their peak power consumption on their vegetable-oil-powered generator was about 30A.
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Comments (14)
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written by GTW, October 13, 2006
It's good to see vegetables being good for people in more than one way... we have to wait and see if the overweight computer geeks will start sacrificing their frying oil to power their computers... this might just be a multi-faceted achievement! :)
Btw, just for reference... total processing power is not measured by the sum of the individual CPU speeds and it won't be accurate for several reasons such as software and hardware scaling inefficiencies, architecture differences between CPUs and interconnect qualities etc. The accepted way to measure the outputs of clusters used for high performance computing (HPC) is by the total number of floating point operations that can be done in a second (on average).
Btw, just for reference... total processing power is not measured by the sum of the individual CPU speeds and it won't be accurate for several reasons such as software and hardware scaling inefficiencies, architecture differences between CPUs and interconnect qualities etc. The accepted way to measure the outputs of clusters used for high performance computing (HPC) is by the total number of floating point operations that can be done in a second (on average).
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written by Nate Lanxon, October 19, 2006
This is so pointless, I love it! Superb waste of time for good reason.
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written by Phil, October 19, 2006
They should have chosen DOS 6.22 with and ran Interlnk Server on the 1ghz PII. That would have impressed me.
Or, they could have added an analog modem per/node with an analog phone line, and hired 31 Pakistani operators for an instant old-skewl call center.
Probably though, they should have used lighter fluid instead of veggie oil, piled the hardware up, ignited it, and had a big nasty geek orgy. That would have been more productive.
Or, they could have added an analog modem per/node with an analog phone line, and hired 31 Pakistani operators for an instant old-skewl call center.
Probably though, they should have used lighter fluid instead of veggie oil, piled the hardware up, ignited it, and had a big nasty geek orgy. That would have been more productive.
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written by Avery Knapp, October 20, 2006
Amps aren't a measure of power. Watts are. How many watts did this system use? My guess would be on the order of a thousand.
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written by steve siverling, October 20, 2006
I could see this used at a college for research purposes. Image what this could do for folding at home!
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written by steve siverling, October 20, 2006
Yes, a new computers could probably be faster but you can make this with out spend alot of money. However I could see a few good uses for this. Such as a college department doing research. Image what this babby could do on folding@home!
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written by VNA, October 20, 2006
I suppose you live in the USA so you use 110V connectors. U*I=P so 110V*30A=3300W
I live in Hungary btw and I did not take GCSE yet.
I didn't want to offend you or any resident of the US I'm just surprised at some people in the USA.
I live in Hungary btw and I did not take GCSE yet.
I didn't want to offend you or any resident of the US I'm just surprised at some people in the USA.
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written by Keith, October 20, 2006
The good thing is that old machines get recycled and reused, which is totally environmentally friendly. However, at the same, we may overlooked the fact that by powering 30 over computers, it's not going to be energy efficient.
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written by Sid Hoffman, October 20, 2006
Well the US is supposed to be 110-120 with most household power ranging 115-120. Even if we use the low end of 115v that's 3450 watts. 3450/22.7 = 152 watts per ghz of computing power. Using a kill-a-watt power meter, my AMD 2.2ghz system at full load uses only 115 watts thanks to it's exceptionally low voltage. That's 52w/ghz. A dual core will use more power, but not a lot more. Figure a dual core 2.4ghz would likely draw 140w for 29w/ghz of effective computing power. The quad cores likely have even better efficiency, and if you have a dual CPU motherboard, that improves it even further. Fully optimized, you could likely reach somewhere in the 20w/ghz at best.
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written by steve siverling, October 20, 2006
This thing though runs on cooking oil, you could use old cooking oil to fuel it.
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written by mb, October 20, 2006
Nice trick, but don't add gigglehurts, that's why we have FLOPS.
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written by beasty, November 25, 2006
Props to the computing, but tell me more about this cooking oil generator... did they make that themselves? Are these things all over the place? Where can I get one?
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written by ken, December 19, 2007
Veg oil power generation is not that new - Rudolph Diesel was doing it back in 1900.
Have a look at this site
www.powercubes.com/listers.html
It's a 1951 single cylinder diesel engine generator that runs the whole house, heats the water and the rooms and uses about a US gallon of veg oil every 2.5 hours.
Ken
Have a look at this site
www.powercubes.com/listers.html
It's a 1951 single cylinder diesel engine generator that runs the whole house, heats the water and the rooms and uses about a US gallon of veg oil every 2.5 hours.
Ken
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If one adopts the near-meaningless convention of adding up all the CPU clock speeds to get "22.7 GHz," for example, then a single tricked-out Mac Pro machine scores 12 GHz (4 cores X 3GHz) all by itself. And it's possible to run two quad-core CPUs in a Mac Pro, scoring, by this silly method, something like 20 GHz in a single box. I don't know how much power that consumes, but I bet it's a lot less than 30A.