Berkeley has this really cool program called BOINC that you can download and donate your computer’s resources to processing scientific data. There are a bunch of projects to pick, from working on climate change, to cancer, to the Large Hadron Collider.

The good folks at linuxserver.io even have a ready to go Docker container for easy setup: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/boinc

Another possibility is running the Archive Team’s Warrior, which downloads data from at risk web sites and uploads them to the Internet Archive: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

Does anyone else have examples of projects like this? My dream is for the Fediverse to have this sort of feature eventually.

  • rah@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    What do you mean by “spare”? Modern CPUs scale their electricity usage according to utilisation.

    • eros@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      One would assume they mean sitting around, doing nothing. Some would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.

      • rah@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.

        That’s not “spare” though. That’s my point.

        • eros@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I mean yeah, but no. It is spare capacity, so it’s spare in one way.

          I have hundreds of gigaflops of computing power sitting idle 80% of the time, I just don’t think the taxpayers would appreciate the power bill if I put it all to use like that. But at home I can spare a few cycles on my solar power sipping Proxmox cluster.

          • rah@feddit.uk
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            1 year ago

            I have a spare room in my house sat idle 80% of the time. I could easily install a few racks of servers in there and have some gigaflops of computing power to contribute.

            But actually, being “idle” isn’t the same thing as “spare” because it would cost a lot of money to install racks of servers, just as it costs money to run computations on an otherwise idle computer.

            So I mean no, but no. It’s only spare capacity in a stupid, convoluted way that’s disconnected from common sense and common usage of the word.

            But you managed to brag about having hundreds of gigaflops of taxpayer-funded computing at your fingertips so good for you, you go for that validation from strangers on the Internet.