We're all wasting CPU cycles!

[techbear]

I got to thinking last night, that my computer is in the next room idling away, not helping me make great games, for the 8 hours I'm asleep, not to mention the times I'm away from my desk.

How can I use these unused CPU cycles? I COULD turn off the computer, but that's not the point.

I could do some sort of genetic algorythm, that's usually pretty time consuming, but the devil's in the details; what am I evolving, and how is it useful in a game?

I could generate procedural enemies/textures/music, but the fitness test usually requires a human to say "that looks good" and "that looks bad". Unless I can program my computer to know whether a given spaceship looks "cool"....

What do you think?

[Fabio]

Do something for the universe, donate your CPU time to the SETI (http://www.seti.org/) institute: join the SETI@HOME project:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

[djdolber]

you could have it spit out hundreds of spaceships and in the morning you select witch stays and witch goes.... Let the randomizer come up with something new and unique. This can be done pretty cool if you mirror your plots. (i did that with points moving in oval shapes, was pretty cool) So you plot on both sides of a horisontal or vertical axis...

[oNyx]

>I COULD turn off the computer, but that's not the point.

If there is nothing to process, turn it just off. Running a machine with *very* low power consumption 24/7 will already cost you 50 bucks a year.

Also doing some mindless number crunching with idle priority isnt free. The only exception to this rule is win9x, which doesnt know anything about HLT. But usually there will be some lowest priority HLT thread for saving power or more complex energy saving schemes (speed step, cool'n'quiet, eist etc).

Always utilizing the cpu 100% means more energy consumption and thus higher bills and more noise (more heat).

Somewhat useful things you can do with processing power are things like transcoding videos, batch crunching graphics (pngout/pngcrush) or insane quality rendering.

[cliffski]

turn the damn thing off! unless you havent noticed, energy bills are going higher and higher (up 22% in the UK so far this year). PCs use a lot of power. probably doesnt help the planet much either.
I put my PC onto standby every night. It restarts from standby in around 2 seconds, and it doesnt waste any power overnight.
I've even taken to doing the same on the TV / DVD player etc. One day, I'll just start turning off the router too...
And as this is my pet topic, buy energy efficient lightbulbs! they are more expensive but they use a sixth of the power, and seem to NEVER break. Plus they fade on gradually over 3-4 seconds which is more pleasant than the sudden *arrrghhhh light* shock that normal ones get you :D.

[Fabio]

Let away that leaving a PC on 24h/day also means that the PC (or some of its expensive components, like the HD for example) will have to be replaced much more often. It will pollute the environment and cost even more than the wasted energy costs.

[Grey Alien]

Even standby consumes power, in fact standby modes on household equipment use a fantasic amount of power over a year. The environment would be better off if TVs, Stereos, Dishwashers etc didn't have standby modes at all.

[Greig Hamilton]

Automated testing.

[princec]

Cliff - hibernate it, don't standby. Even standby uses a few watts.

Cas :)

[Savant]

Turning your computer on/off is harder on it's mechanical parts than just letting it run and keeping the hard drives spinning. So it's $50 a year in extra power bills or replacing mechanical components (like the hard drive) more often. Your choice. :)

[Fry Crayola]

If we don't have everything on at the same time, then the power plants will be inefficient!

;)

[GBGames]

I have my machine do automated iterative backups every so often. It is better when they happen while I am asleep.

[BarrySlisk]

And as this is my pet topic, buy energy efficient lightbulbs! they are more expensive but they use a sixth of the power, and seem to NEVER break.
I really wanted to save money and single handedly (correct spelling?) save the environment (once), so I bought one of those damn power saving bulbs. It broke after a few hours. Oh well, just unlucky I guess. So I buy a new one..What do you know? It broke as well. Now I'm back to normal bulbs. If they break at least they don't cost much.

[Sybixsus]

I really wanted to save money and single handedly (correct spelling?) save the environment (once), so I bought one of those damn power saving bulbs. It broke after a few hours. Oh well, just unlucky I guess. So I buy a new one..What do you know? It broke as well. Now I'm back to normal bulbs. If they break at least they don't cost much.


Exactly the same experience I had with them.

[fog4711]

Exactly the same experience I had with them.

Where do you guys buy them :confused: ? @ Cheap-Mart :eek: I have replaced every possible bulb @ home and never experienced any such problems. It seemed to give the desired effect too :) . Last time I spoke to the power company they 'complained' that I had an incredibly low power consumption (800 kWh/yr).

[Gary Preston]

Download BOINC and donate your free cycles to climate forcasting, or cancer research. Both very good causes to donate to :)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/aboutexperiment1.shtml

and for boinc projects in general http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Sure you'll be paying for the electricity bill for keeping it on, but if you're doing so anyway, it may as well go to a good cause. Think of it as making a $50 doller (or whatever it works out at) donation to the worlds future :)

[Grey Alien]

Seems like last year showed one of the largest Carbon Dioxide rises on record:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4803460.stm

Those energy saver bulbs last ages for me and keep my bill down, we haven't had to replace any yet!

I actually switch all the stuff off at night because the faint electronic noise sometimes annoys me. Once in the night there was a power cut and I was amazed at a) how dark it was and b) how beutifully silent everything was.

[oNyx]

Turning your computer on/off is harder on it's mechanical parts than just letting it run and keeping the hard drives spinning. So it's $50 a year in extra power bills or replacing mechanical components (like the hard drive) more often. Your choice. :)

That 50 bucks figure is the lowest value. It can be easily 4 times as much.

And mechanical wear... dunno. AFAICT the risk of failure due to that is practically non existant. However, temperature fluctuation causes differently strong extension/contraction of the different materials. This can lead to fissures on the circuit pathes. But thats also pretty unusual.

Letting your machine run 24/7 wears electrolyte capacitors (they can burst or start leaking). The higher the temperature the higher the wastage. And the more wasted they are the more heat they produce by themselves, which accelerates the whole process. If a single cap is arced, you can start looking for a new mainboard/PSU/graphics card. Total failure or high instability is just around the corner. (My enermax PSU died by capacitor leakage.)

And constant access to the hdd will also cause a shorter lifespan.

Hardware can easily last 6 years or even longer. No matter how its used (usual 20° climate). The only exception are hdds, which may not be build for 24/7 usage (just spinning) and reading/writing will always cause some wear.

Oh and ATX PSUs even consume energy if the PC is switched off. Thats because ATX needs some energy for detecting if that switch circuit was closed and for wake-on-lan. For saving energy use some multiway connector thingy with a switch. But be careful were you put it... accidently flipping it off with your foot can be pretty annoying.

[techbear]

I appreciate everyone's power-saving and environmental acumen, and I was well aware of opportunities to donate my cpu cycles to giant distributed data-crunching projects. But that wasn't the point of my post.

I was dreaming, blue-sky-ing, about using the vast amount of computing power available on our very desktops to help us make computer games, using techniques which would capitalise on the fact that we don't use our machines interactively 24/7.

I just wanted you to dream with me. :)

[mahlzeit]

I used to summon leprechauns from the magic forest to work on my games at night while I was asleep but it turned out they were crap at programming and made too much of a ruckus. The cops finally took them away, and I changed my passwords just in case. YMMV.

[varmint]

I generally leave my systems running regression tests from cleans builds out of CVS. :D :D

[Davaris]

I was dreaming, blue-sky-ing, about using the vast amount of computing power available on our very desktops to help us make computer games, using techniques which would capitalise on the fact that we don't use our machines interactively 24/7.


I heard about a project similar to the Setti project, where you can let other people on the net use small amounts of your computer's processing power to render their images faster. :)

[Adam]

I had my copmuter develop board layouts for a puzzle game, if i was a better programmer id have it solve them as well.

[electronicStar]

I can't use my computer during night time because....I'm on my computer during night time!
D'oh!

[Graeme]

haha, yeah, if you don't wanna listen to these environmentalist nuts (:D) you could let your computer spend its energy backing up your files at night, or you could just not go to bed. Either way.

[DanMarshall]

It's a lesser example, but still valid.

I left my game running for an hour or so on each map, with the AI bot leaving a marker behind him wherever he went.

This meant I could go back to it (having done something else constructive), and see which areas of the map he visited most, where he was having problems etc. I thought I was some sort of uber-genius...

[Sharkbait]

From my own experience, computers left to run 24/7 seem to last longer.

And on the subject of energy saving bulbs, they don't like being switched on and off very often.. so they are best left for applications where you want the light on for extended periods of time.. say a kitchen / living area in the evening or a hallway.. definitely a no-no for bathrooms and other such places. Turning them on and off at short intervals drastically reduces their lifetime!

[cliffski]

you sure thats not older bulbs? like I say, every room in my house has them, and have had them for years, and yet I've never replaced any. They must go on and off many times each every day.
Its not so much being an environmental nut, as just saving money *shrug*.

[Artinum]

Spotlights are the worst. They seem to go pop far more often than normal bulbs and can be the very devil to extract when they do. I remember in one rented house, changing the bulb meant removing it from the ceiling - and being showered by dead insects. Bleargh.

My computer is always shut down overnight. I wouldn't be able to sleep knowing it was still humming away. I might be tempted to leave it running and use those CPU cycles if my brain could do the same thing, but alas I am addicted to this bizarre habit of losing consciousness for about eight hours at a time.

[Fabio]

By the way, do computers dream when they sleep?

Because, if so, then I've got a good reason to make them sleep a bit (or a byte) each day. :)

[Savant]

My computer is always shut down overnight. I wouldn't be able to sleep knowing it was still humming away. I might be tempted to leave it running and use those CPU cycles if my brain could do the same thing, but alas I am addicted to this bizarre habit of losing consciousness for about eight hours at a time.
Your computer is an inanimate object. It doesn't care. :)

[Chozabu]

By the way, do computers dream when they sleep?

Because, if so, then I've got a good reason to make them sleep a bit (or a byte) each day. :)

Why, yes they do!
http://electricsheep.org/

ok, not while its sleeping, ill admit...

My computer is wasting cycles for sure, though its not idle... several times ive fallen asleep with my head on the keyboard and woken up to find many pages of crap in the middle of a program.
If i was a little geekier id have saved that "data" and written a program to trace where on the keyboard my head rolled during the night :)

[Fabio]

"I've seen things you people would't believe.." ;)

[Savant]

several times ive fallen asleep with my head on the keyboard and woken up to find many pages of crap in the middle of a program.
I find this hard to fathom. Go to bed. It's not that hard.

[Chozabu]

I find this hard to fathom. Go to bed. It's not that hard.
when this happens i am in bed...

yes, my bed is next to my pc, though a little weird at first its very cool!
sometimes also, ive gone to sleep in the middle of something, and resumed as soon as i wake up (inconvenient for forum posts, several new ones have been submitted between the time of pressing "reply" and "submit")