Project:Heater

We are responsible for providing our own electric heater for the space at OVADA, I think it would be fun to use computers as heating elements instead of bits of wire. The efficiency will be just as good, but we will get number crunching as a byproduct (plus we will have a wonderfully geeky heating system).

Name

It will need a name, ideally it will be puntastic. So far I can only come up with "Craydaitor", which would require building it in this sort of shape; I don't know that we can really justify devoting so much floor space to a bad pun. Anyone else got any better ideas?

Design

Control

The system will be controlled by a raspberry pi, allowing a low (a few Watts) standby power as well as lots of options for control. The main control script is written in ruby and can be seen here

Sensor

The temperature is measured using a DS18B20 and set up according to this

Computer switching

I'm currently thinking of using WoL and some sort of SSH script to turn the computers on/off; I'll see what works well once I have some.

The computers

I'm currently looking for these, ideally I want about half a dozen old desktops that are identical (or similar). Performance isn't really important (better performance would be nicer, but isn't a priority), the most important factor is power:size ratio (that is electrical power, not computing power); I want to pack around 1kW of heating power into a relatively small volume.

I intend to use an 8 port switch to connect the 6 computers to the raspi and an upstream network connection (or run wifi through the raspi if required) and install some sort of Linux (probably debian) on them. Exactly how they'll be configured I've still not decided; I'm tempted to have aplay at making a cluster, but I don't really know what I'm doing and I get the impression that unless people wrote cluster-specific code it would be less useful than a bunch of independant computers.

Things to do with it

I've had a few ideas of numbers to crunch, although I'm open to suggestions and people are welcome to use it for their own projects. The main issue is that it'll only do work while the heating is on, so don't expect much during the summer.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null

Simple way to hammer the cpu, doesn't do anything worthwhile but might be good to set it running with a high niceness to pick up the slack if other things become io bound etc.

Bitcoin mining

We won't make any reasonable amount of money (anyone got an estimate? a penny on the pound? less?), but we might be able to afford a few penny sweets at christmas.

Something @home

Does something worthwhile. I suspect that these things are designed deliberatly to not hammer the shit out of the computer though, can this be configured?

RoboNucleicAcid

A personal project of Mike's, uses genetic algorithms to evolve robocode bots. More details here.

Prime number searching

Nick suggested looking for big primes, maybe using GIMPS

High bandwidth Tor nodes

Running Tor relays makes use of both CPU power and spare network bandwidth. To use much processing power this would require more bandwidth than the space currently has, although if we got a fibre optic Internet connection (as some people have been interested in getting) it would be practical. To run many instances (required to best utilise multiple CPU cores) additional IPv4 address space would be required. It would not be neccesary to be an exit, being a non-exit relay is possible. Tor relaying, unlike Bitcoin mining, or many @home projects, is not something currently possible on (and made obsolete by) GPUs. For best performance, CPUs supporting AES instruction sets should be used. It may be possible to partner with TorServers.