I ran 16 machines in the basement here at one point. Trust me. The temperature will go over 80. Computers double as decent space heaters.

One other thing you should consider, depending on where you live.

Summer is coming up quick in the US. If you live on the Top side of the world, there will be a lot of waste heat generated by an array of computer systems, which will need to be taken care of.

When talking electric bill, just don't forget about cooling all those PCs running at Max.

2)Your current system seems about $50 cheaper than a Dell box with the same quad chip, 3gig of ram (instead of your 1gig), a 500g drive (instead of your 0g drive), a case, cd/dvd drive, keyboard, and mouse and maybe a few other things...so...although Dell might be a slight monopoly, why not just buy a bunch of the same Dell machines? I would understand if it was physical size dimensions issue and/or power sucking issue...care to elaborate? Just wondering. Heck, you could sell the 500g drives for $100 a pop not to mention the dvd/cd drive for $25.

I'm using 2GB on my quads, not 1. I'm more concerned about the quality and capability of parts rather than quantity. A stock Q6600 gets around 1650 RAC (at least for me). Pushing it to 3GHz gets around 2400. That's not something as easily done with a cheap Dell. The Dell also wouldn't be designed for 24/7 overclocked use. Building it myself lets me design it how I want.

Anyway, overall I'd love to learn a little bit more about where you bought your equipment, how it was set up, some pics, etc. I'm technical, I just haven't played around with diskless systems, Linux operating systems, etc.

I mostly buy my parts from Mwave, Fry's (they've been selling retail Q6600s for $200 or less), and Directron.

I really should get around to making a web page for this.
/me adds item to rarely checked to do list

I suspect the money would be better used by the developers and scientists than in buying more CPUs.

The CPUs would represent a fairly small fraction of total computing power and, and as time goes on their relative value would devaluate.

The money could be used by the project to improve the scientific code that runs on ALL cpus, or hire more staff to branch out in new scientific directions that might not be explored otherwise, or hire some consultant programmers to help optimize the code running on ALL cpus, or maybe help port it to other platforms (PS3, GPUs, etc).

If you make the donation, you can certainly make it with certain conditions. That might not be the wisest thing as you have a lot less information about what should be prioritized than the project managers, but it's still your money, so if you say "I give you this IF it is spent to improve research on X", it is then their choice to accept or not.

Or you could ask the project to submit you their best ideas of what they could do with the money, and you can then accept or refuse.

But if this isn't just a hypothetical, I strongly encourage you. If your donation helps speed up a breakthrough by even one month, it could still reduce human suffering tremendously.

So what about it Rosie crunchers, anyone with Sony PS3 connections?

The PS3 (as with all consoles) is sold at a loss and the money is made on games, so they'd probably charge a premium for crunchers rather than giving a discount! They've also sold their cell manufacturing facilities to Toshiba I believe (although it might be a share scheme), so I'm not sure there will be a PS4...

Sounds like a great project! Do keep us posted.

Depending on what you want to crunch, though, it might be more cost effective to just buy a lot of PS3s and crunch for Folding@home.

But if you want to do Rosetta@home (which I prefer to Folding because of the science but also because it's smaller, so the marginal utility of a new CPU is higher), the Quad-core route is probably the best one. Depending on your time frame, you might want to wait for Intel's six-core chips that are coming in the second half of 2008.

Good luck!

I'm not sure I'm answering your question properly.

"user activity" is determined by mouse or keyboard activity and that activates a timer. so for example, if mouse if moved, boinc sees the user as "active" for X minutes. (I think it's 3 minutes)

Advertising is pretty darn cheap...especially for non-profit type organizations.

Eric, if you are aware of programs for promotion of non-profits, have you contacted them and inquired about the details required to participate? And the specific costs involved? If you find a program where you feel the project should be participating, gather the specifics and shoot me an EMail and I'll make sure the information finds it's way to the right hands.

There is some advertising done vicariously through Grid Republic via Google's program for non-profits. Other then that, I don't believe any advertising is being done. The primary reasons for that likely being that the scientists know much more about publishing their work then writing an advertising campaign, and the costs involved. If you compare the costs to buying the machines yourself and running them, advertising is probably clearly cheaper. But that is not the option they are faced with. They don't have the budgets to buy all the machines themselves, and so there's no actual cost savings when you compare to something that's not a viable option.

...But what does Rosetta@home do? Nothing it seems. No automated Thank You e-mails, no diplomas, not even a friggin gold star next to your name for whatever reason. We crunchers dedicate all those CPU cycles and receive nothing in return. Where are the RL results? Where are the cures? Where is our deserved appreciation?