FreeBSD Einstein

P

Poiein

Anyone crunching numbers for EINSTEIN@HOME? It is one of the larger BOINC projects that looks for gravitational waves from sources such as pulsars, among any other possible source. It's kinda the whole space time continuum groove, but the implications from certain detections would change the understanding of /dev/null or maybe just a lot of urandom entropy, it would be shattering anyway.

In any case, their is a FreeBSD team, team ID 746 that has been going for about seven years, give or take.

A team dedicated to the users of FreeBSD running BOINC under linux compatibility mode, or a native FreeBSD BOINC build. Team FreeBSD is dedicated to users of FreeBSD, but not limited to JUST the users. Anyone with the interest in developing a community of people interested in technology, open standards, NIX or BSD based operating systems are welcome and encouraged to earn credits and share ideas and conversation.

The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee team page - thought I would post this since it is a team of FreeBSD enthusiasts, and maybe get a few interested in the EINSTEIN@HOME project and what it involves.
 
Word of warning: I used to BOINC for a year straight. That's before I found out my electricity bills went from €100 to €250 a month because I ran BOINC at full capacity on (back then) two dual-core home servers. Make sure you know that there's no such thing as 'free CPU cycles to spare'. You're paying for it, or your employer is, or your parents are. Other than that: more power to you [sic].
 
Folding @ home

BOINC is pretty interesting, and cosmology is a trivial pursuit of mine. But - there's a project at Stanford called Folding @ Home that is dedicated to deciphering Alzheimer's by studying how the improper folding of protein happens (which causes the disease). So - I felt like I could contribute to humanity. Plus, I'm a lot closer than some other forum members to those golden "danger" years :)

Folding @ Home also provides a Linux compatibility client for FreeBSD users. When I saw how tiny my contribution was (not many peta-flops at this residence) - I stopped after a few months. I never came to grips with what kind of monster machines they must be running to be at the top of the stats list.
 
I am using BOINC to compute for World Community Grid. @DutchDaemon's comment about the electricity cost is certainly true. However, if you live in British Columbia (Canada), like I do, the picture can be quite different. Electricity is dirt cheap (6.9 to 10.5 cents Canadian per kWh) and clean (more than 90% renewable hydro energy).

As a result, we even heat the house electrically. And it really makes no difference if I use the electric heat directly or by way of the "silicone based heater". :e

I do take a hiatus from crunching in Summer, though.

BTW: my total electric bill for a 400 m2 house (electric heat, lots of computer stuff) is about 170 euro per month!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top