[ExI] homebrew cold freon bath super computer

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Tomasz Rola
>...Subject: Re: [ExI] homebrew cold freon bath super computer

>...And some afterthoughts, batch no. ...

On Sat, 10 Mar 2012, Tomasz Rola wrote:

>>... Now, after you perform manual labour and make all the easy stuff, 

>...The list wasn't meant to scare you off (hint: say you wasn't scared).
...Regards, Tomasz Rola

--

I wasn't scared.

I presented the question this evening to a friend who is a processor
hipster, and he assured me there are plenty of processors available whose
power use is so low, I would be unlikely to need to resort to heat transfer
heroics.  So then my task was to convince him that I really like heat
transfer heroics.

In any case, I got to looking at my refrigerator and doing some calcs, and
realized that rejecting a steady 100 watts would really challenge the thing.
I like really challenging my refrigerator.  I want to rig some kind of
feedback loop such that I can run a bunch of processes, then have them shut
down as soon as it gets above about 6C in there, and turn back on when it
drops below about 2C.  I think GIMPS would be a good application: very
calculation intensive, doesn't require a lot of I/O, and if for whatever
reason there is no I/O available for months at a time, it stores the work it
has done.  We could have them grind away on 100 megadigit primes, for which
the EFF 150kUSD prize is still out there.  Of course it wouldn't pay for the
electricity used, since it would cost about 8 cents for each candidate, and
the mathematical expectation is just over one cent each, but it would be
cool anyway:

https://www.eff.org/awards/coop

Tomasz, there is something I need to explain.  Back in the 80s, before there
were all that many computer applications, those of us who were into that
kind of thing used to build up fast computers, by finding the fastest
processor board available, overclocking it, getting the fastest memory
available, the biggest disk drive, some of which held a thousandth as much
as a five dollar keychain drive today, assuming one had plenty of extra
money to spend on it, and connect it all up to a 15 inch color monitor.
Then we were in tall cotton, my young friends.  We were hot stuff, the bees
knees.  It was a natural geek version of having a hopped up car.  Of course
we still didn't really have any good applications for the machines in those
days.  But it is making me nuts to think of processors going into the trash,
when they could be salvaged perhaps and put to work doing something, even if
useless.

spike