The Worthy Cost Of Folding
We have been covering Stanford’s Folding@Home project for a few weeks now and can’t say enough good things about this thoughtful program. Concerns have been voiced about how much it costs to keep your Playstation 3 on 24/7 to help out with the program. The PS3 uses about 200W of power while running the application. IGN used statistics from the Nebraska state Electricity Rate Comparison chart to create a simple chart that calculates the cost per month to run the program.
I found out that in the lovely state of Georgia, it only costs $10.53, compared to $18.82 in New York, $27.76 in Hawaii, and those lucky bastards in Idaho only have to pay $6.88. How can I get those wattage rates down here? Regardless how much it costs, it is worth the price. I encourage anyone and everyone to participate.
The Cost of Folding[IGN]
Toots
Posted to Video Games, Videos on 28 March 2007
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: cancer, folding@home, medical, ps3, stanford
You can't just state it's worth the price, basically we need more info.
What is the productivity of the folding it does? And what would it cost them to do the calculations on computers they own, or even go without?
After all it isn't the case that the PS3 is on anyway, you are leaving it on for that, if the value of the calculations is only 1 cent, and you are paying $10 to keep it on, then giving them $5 you are both better off that you would otherwise be - and you can feel even better about yourself, what charity is really all about!
In short my view is yes if they can take advantage of spare CPU cycles while you are playing games that's great, but if it's worth using real resources (coal, uranium, gas) that otherwise wouldn't have been is a different matter.
The whole spare cpu cycle thing is how this runs on personal computers. When you turn it on, it doesn't drain any resources, running only using the spare change the processor offers. From what I'm gathering with the PS3, it's a huge power sucker and Folding@HOME doesn't really work too well on it unless you're doing nothing else. You'd think that with, what is it, EIGHT processor cores that it could do a better multitasking job.