Ask HN: What fuel for my data furnace? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What fuel for my data furnace?

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I have a server with two old 6-core Xeon CPUs in it. In winter I used to run it full tilt on SETI and get a noticeable bump in room temperature.

Now that SETI is mothballed, what charity or mining software would you recommend I run? Anything more productive than re-calculating pi is my goal.

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I run fishnet[0] to help Lichess[1] analyze chess games.

[0]: https://github.com/lichess-org/fishnet [1]: https://lichess.org/

This is super cool. Lichess deserves all its praise and more, what a great idea.

That is pretty cool. Thank you for the recommendation!

My personal recommendation would be Folding@Home[1]. Protein folding is an insanely complex thing life does and they use distributed computing to try to solve the large problems.

1. https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en

I've been wondering about this for a while now: Does F@H actually still have a real purpose, or is it purely a vanity project at this point?

My lay impression is that AlphaFold (and now AlphaFold v2) solves the same problem F@H solves, but better, faster, and cheaper (at least, if compute power wasn't all donated).

Is that not true? Are they somehow complementary? Just how much did AlphaFold eat F@H's lunch?

F@H is a physics simulation. It is going to get closer to truth as we understand it. AlphaFold is going to be more pattern matching based on previously identified relationships.

AF did a tremendous amount of work in patching up our spotty structure database, but those hairy, novel regions are still going to require extensive computation to model, which is better done by simulation.

F@H simulates down to the atoms to verify, while AlphaFold uses AI to take shortcuts humans can't see with our limited variable tracking ability. If the projects start working together, I can potentially see AlphaFold generating simulations of interest and sending them to Folding@Home to distribute and verify.

They are both working towards the same goal, but with different methods. Sort of like DSL vs Cable internet - both deliver the internet but how it gets there and what each technology allows you to do due to the difference between telephone lines and coaxial cable are quite different, and can even run side by side for extra coverage in case of an ISP outage :)

Thank you for the recommendation!

ArchiveTeam Warrior, help preserve internet history: https://warrior.archiveteam.org/

Granted, the Warrior is probably more network-bound than CPU-bound.

If you go to http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ rather than https, it won't hassle you about the warrior. subdomain not being an altname for the SSL certificate. Warriorhq. is on the cert though.

Thank you for the recommendation!

I actually tried warrior a while back, but noticed it was mostly just backing up reddit porn, and decided not all things require archival.

I think you can select which archiving projects you want to help with.

I'll give it another shot then, thank you for mentioning that.

Does this mean you can set it to archive ONLY reddit porn?

Asking for a friend.

One idea is the World Community grid, a lot of great projects for different causes. The link below is the Dinosaur Comics team (slightly biased here), but there are plenty of others. Haven't researched it very much, but this just popped into my head.

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?team...

Thank you for the recommendation!

I wound up installing BOINC and adding WCG along with a few others.

(List of Volunteer Computing Projects)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...]

There's quite a few out there, most of which are BOINC based. Just a few clicks on your existing SETI setup and you'll be turning electrons into radiant heat.

Also I don't know how to markdown.

HN doesnt let you make pretty hyperlinks, it's why another comment in the thread has numbered footnotes instead.

Thank you!

If you have enough system RAM, you could make it into an AI server. This is more GPU VRAM bound more than anything else, but software like llama.cpp will let you run mixed inference across a GPU and your CPU. Check out /r/LocalLlama on Reddit if you would like to learn more.

Of course image generation models are also an option and generally need less VRAM.

https://distributed.net is still going on while newfangled seti@home is dead

That's a fascinating website. Thank you!

Wow. I remember participating in the RC5 challenge a loooong time ago. These days, a household of smartphones probably has more power, lol.

What are they working on?

May I interest you in the magical world of... ... CRYPTO MINING???

My very uninformed understanding is that asic miners made cpu mining irrelevant a while back. Is that not the case?

Depends on the cryptocurrency. Some are designed to be intentionally difficult-to-impossible to optimize with an asic, with Monero being the big one I think is most well known.

> Monero uses randomx, an ASIC-resistant and CPU-friendly POW algorithm created by Monero community members, designed to make the use of mining-specific hardware unfeasible.

https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/calculator?h=54.00&p=...

https://xmrig.com/benchmark

> two old 6-core Xeon CPUs in it

Unless electricity is free, probably gonna spend more on electricity than they're making in monero (or any other coin).

If OP is using a space heater or an electrical furnace to heat their home, then the money they make would offset the electricity bill a bit, since computers are efficient heaters.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/gaming-pc-vs-spac...

This is not true for all crypto coins. A small proportion of mining hash functions are deliberately designed to thwart ASICs, e.g. https://github.com/tevador/RandomX. It's a cat-and-mouse game, though: CryptoNight was designed to fulfill the same role, but ultimately failed: https://monerodocs.org/proof-of-work/cryptonight/.

download stable diffusion and generate weird images, forever.

Boinc is still a thing

Am I wrong to think that most of this effort will ultimately be for nothing when quantum computing comes to fruition and does all this work practically instantly? Perhaps best to get an efficient space heater that is turned on when needed?

It’s more applicable to some problems than others, but many hard problems today will be solved in a trivial fashion.

Yes, you are wrong to think that. Every computer is manufactured with the knowledge that we will have superior computers in just a few years. :)

Am I wrong to think about eating food today when I will eventually be dead, at which point I won't require food ever again?

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