All my machines run one program – Help Fight Childhood Cancer, and I’m coming up on 5 years donated to this program. I also have 2 years on FightAIDS@Home, but haven’t run that program in a while. For inspiration, I would give offer this link – families of the children that have Neuroblastoma.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/
Here’s a little about me. I am the primary developer / architect for the State Food Distribution System for California, Ohio, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Missouri. I’m afraid to actually admit how many users this system will eventually have when all these states go live. Every school or educational facility that accepts USDA Commodities in the 6 states mentioned. Ugh. At the rate my company is adding these contracts, there might be even more states later. That’s a good “Ugh”. I count myself lucky to be employed as bad as things have been lately with the economy.
I program using Microsoft Visual Studio, ASP.Net, C#, SQL Server, HTML, Javascript and an assortment of other languages. I work from home in Tucson for a Phoenix Consulting firm called Colyar Consulting Group. I give my company tons of credit, specifically regarding WCG because the I7 and one of the P4’s are actually my development machines, owned by CCG. The I7 is here in my house, and the P4 is on site in Phoenix.
I run WCG at 100% utilization on this I7, and it’s so fast that I hardly notice the program is even running. Running all of my machines 24/7 so I could increase my donated time started a couple months ago. I have enough processors/machines to keep 19 files running simultaneously.
I’ve had some crazy ideas about getting people to donate their (running) old computers so they can run WCG. Here’s the short version. Build a box with air ventilation and lots of power strips, and a wireless router. Take computers from people as donations. Strip them down to the following: Motherboard, Processor, Memory, Power Supply. Remove the case, hard drives, fans, CD ROM’s... strip these things down so that up to 10 donated computers can fit inside the box. Computers must be able to boot Linux from a 4gb USB memory stick, and communicate with the wireless router via another USB wireless stick. Those two USB devices are the only two investments to get this up and running per computer (less than $10.00 each on NewEgg), and the computer can be compatibility checked before it’s donated and stripped down. If it can boot Linux from USB, and communicate, it’s good.
I haven’t yet tested how WCG performs on a Linux machine booted from USB. I don’t know a lot about Linux, but I envision having a Linux build on some master location that I can use to flash to the USB devices. The OS would have everything installed and would start WCG automatically upon boot with pre-installed settings.
Imagine that. Who cares if the machines are slow? There’s so many of them, they make up for their slowness in numbers. The box has a power cord and a network cable and sits in your garage. Electricity usage would be about 700 – 1200 watts depending on the power of the 10 installed machines… it might cost about $20.00 - $40.00 a month if it was on 24/7.
Anyway, that’s my idea.
David Griebel – lithium6941
