Ask HN: Carbon emissions from the Engine Yard contest? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Carbon emissions from the Engine Yard contest?

Way back in the day, I overclocked my desktop computer so I could run SETI@home faster. I've always wondered how much electricity I wasted by running SETI instead of shutting it down when I wasn't using it.

Anyone care to guess how much electricity (and resulting CO2) has been used for the Engine Yard contest? I'm not saying the contest was some sort of ecological disaster, but I would suggest that perhaps EY should put up a little money toward offsetting the carbon footprint generated. Plant some trees or something.

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Here's my quick back-of-the-napkin estimate:

Given that the winning teams seemed to be running clusters of around 20-30 systems full-bore for >24 hours, the power draw would be something like 500 watts * 20 systems * 24 hours, giving us something on the order of 240 kWHr consumed per team. (Some teams may have consumed far less, but the successful ones seemed to be running many CPU or GPU cores on relatively high-spec servers.)

According to the DoE[1], the average CO2 emissions for power generation nationwide is 1.3 pounds per kWHr. Given that, we're get about 312 pounds of carbon per team. A single cross-country airline flight can produce several thousand pounds of carbon, so all told, the contest probably has a small carbon footprint than a major business sales meeting or small tech conference.

1 - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2...

Exactly what I was asking for. Thanks!

This would be difficult to calculate, because many of the resources dedicated to EY would still be running without the contest - they just would be doing something else.

Figuring out how much extra power is used solely for EY, that would otherwise be turned off?

You'd need to poll all participants and find out what hardware they are throwing at it vs. their normal operating state. I think it would be a worthwhile effort, but might be fairly tedious.

Yeah, with my SETI example, I overclocked my computer mainly for the purpose of running the SETI client faster. I assume that an overclocked machine uses more power, and that an overclocked machine at 100% CPU utilization uses significantly more.

I'd be interested mainly in a ballpark/analogy figure. Are we talking "I forgot to turn off the night-light" or "Could power 5 homes for a year"?

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