# Would it be credible if I were to use my ENTIRE Home Datacenter for WCG Research?



## Ensefalon (Jan 4, 2018)

I have 4000 pounds of servers lying in a 1100 sq. foot server room enclosure. The electric company has called about it before but, My best friend's got cancer, and I'd do anything in my power to help this person even if it involves something as passively improving as the WCG.

400 Ampere service with 3 phase delta supplies the jewce for this. Roughly 100kw of electricity I would run into my home. I am willing to do anything for this person at this point, and I am pretty sure my electrical bill could pay for his treatment if I were to turn on every damn server in my datacenter. It'd take me only an hour to boot every single copy of windows server 2016 running boinc into action. But I have done an electrical stress test like this before and I pull about 51kw/h under full load and stress. Which is roughly in my area a dollar a kw hour, which I would run for the next 6 months. Am I credible? Am I a good person for doing this because of someone who I have known my entire life now has cancer?


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## erocker (Jan 4, 2018)

This is more of a moral question then a tech question. Do what you can I suppose.


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## thesmokingman (Jan 4, 2018)

You're better off taking that money in utility costs and paying your friends bills imo.


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## Ensefalon (Jan 4, 2018)

thesmokingman said:


> You're better off taking that money in utility costs and paying your friends bills imo.



A dollar an hour is nothing once you enable the litecoin side of things lol


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## Toothless (Jan 4, 2018)

I second the paying bills part. WCG is a long term volunteer thing that won't directly help your friend at this exact moment. 

What kind of server rigs you got in there?


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## Ensefalon (Jan 4, 2018)

Toothless said:


> I second the paying bills part. WCG is a long term volunteer thing that won't directly help your friend at this exact moment.
> 
> What kind of server rigs you got in there?


Every proliant generation except G9 and higher, Same for just the normal poweredges from 10 years back, some of the  R#10 and R#20 models. I am using a poweredge 810 as the current workstation I am typing this with. About 300 ish functional servers, Some I don't even know if they turn on or not, or if they have RAM or CPUs installed either. I am in demand for hard drives and most of these machines boot of the network.


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## Norton (Jan 4, 2018)

Sorry to hear about your friend 

As long as you have permission to run the machines and you have accounted for the power cost then it's up to you how you use them- it would be a great boost to WCG to bring that much power to bear.



Ensefalon said:


> A dollar an hour is nothing once you enable the litecoin side of things lol


So you're considering to mining as an income source and crunching for WCG?


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## Fouquin (Jan 4, 2018)

Norton said:


> So you're considering to mining as an income source and crunching for WCG?



Seems like the plan is to mine on the side to compensate for the operating expense of the hardware.


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## FordGT90Concept (Jan 4, 2018)

Tech side: you're talking 100kW of heat.  Cooling capacity is going to cost as much or more than electricity to drive the machines.  Maintaining all this equipment will also likely become your full time job.

Science side: even if you turned your house into a datacenter, it's still only a small drop in a very big pool.  BOINC helps understand biology functions but doesn't directly lead to a cure for anything.  Biologists have to take the results of the project and find applications for them.  It takes decades to turn BOINC calculations into commercial therapies at best.

Moral side: you're preemptively grieving...taking your frustrations and directing it into finding a cure.  Cancer usually isn't a death sentence anymore.  Even if it is, most people with cancer just want to be treated as human beings.  Spend time with them and don't act like it's the last time you'll see them.  Have fun and enjoy life with them.  Laboring over a server farm isn't going to bring happiness to either of you.

Side note: $1/khr is ridiculous.  It's $0.05211 here.


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## R-T-B (Jan 4, 2018)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Side note: $1/khr is ridiculous.  It's $0.05211 here.



I agree with all your post on the moral side, but he means it costs a dollar to run his 51 kw/h rigs for one hour, I think.

As for the moral side, my father has cancer.  If you can afford the electric, be there to help your friend with the bills.  He will need it at some point and it's one less thing for him to worry about if he makes it.


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## twilyth (Jan 4, 2018)

If the primary motivation is to help your friend then I have to agree with the sentiments already expressed here.  While practical applications of the research we do on behalf of WCG can be realized in the near future, most of the work is basic research which doesn't have immediate practical effect.  

So being a source of both financial and emotional support for your friend would be a much better use of your time, money and emotional energy.

Of course the team would be very happy to see the bump it would give us in the stats, but that's not why we do this.  That's just a fun aside that helps keep us motivated.  Without the sense of community the team gives us, it would be difficult to run and maintain our crunching farms, day after day and year after year.


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## Sasqui (Jan 4, 2018)

Sorry about your friend as well.



Ensefalon said:


> Every proliant generation except G9 and higher, Same for just the normal poweredges from 10 years back



WCG benefits from cores almost linearly.  In your case, the power to WCG processing count is probably rather low compared to something newer but "outdated" that's about 5-6 years old.  I have two X5670 CPU's in consumer X58 boards for a total of 24 threads dedicated to WCG.

My opinion, and it's just that, an opinion:  The money you'd use on electric would be better spent on donating directly to your friend for expenses and quality of life, or to a charity doing research... and there are many.


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## Ensefalon (Jan 5, 2018)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Side note: $1/khr is ridiculous.  It's $0.05211 here.



I meant it's 1 dollar to run 51kw for a single hour.



Sasqui said:


> Sorry about your friend as well.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I have about 1300 ready available cores if I run the whole setup. 5100 Series intel processor lines and up


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## XZero450 (Jan 5, 2018)

@Ensefalon, many of us here, that crunch every day, have lost someone in our lives that ultimately caused us to commit to doing so. There are a lot of others that crunch simply because they can and believe in what these computations do. Whether you crunch today or not, the outcome that your friend will have likely wont change but it certainly could have an impact for someone in the future.

The hardest part for me over the last year, was recognizing that there was nothing I could do except enjoy the time I had and support as best I could. My situation was very much a "death sentence" from cancer and the prognosis was wrong where in we only had a year instead of 2 - 3 years, and thus I highly encourage making time to be with your friend, if possible, and support them and their family as you are able - and this is true even when it's not a "death sentence" because treatment is always hard and stressful on the whole family.


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## yotano211 (Jan 5, 2018)

Ensefalon said:


> I meant it's 1 dollar to run 51kw for a single hour.
> 
> 
> I have about 1300 ready available cores if I run the whole setup. 5100 Series intel processor lines and up


That much power and it only costs that little in power, I have about 71 graphics cards mining ETH and it cost me about .90 cents per hour to run everything at .085 cent p/kw/h


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## xvi (Jan 5, 2018)

There's certainly no obligation to crunch, moral or otherwise. Like others have mentioned, it may be best now to focus directly on your friend and I believe everyone here would wholeheartedly support that decision if that's what you chose. I think it's unlikely that any WCG contributions now would directly affect your friend, but it would help future research.

I started contributing after I lost a grandmother to cancer and continued when I lost my other grandmother to it as well. I've scaled back pretty heavily due to time and space constraints. Everyone is welcome to crunch or not for any reason and no judgment is passed either way.

On a technical note, I'm really curious to know what kind of PPD a setup like that would generate. We have a PPD/watt thread that's mostly filled with low power, high-efficiency PCs. It'd be interesting to see how efficient a farm that focuses on compute density would be.


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## lexluthermiester (Jan 5, 2018)

@Ensefalon
A lot of good thoughts have been expressed above. My $0.02, there's nothing stopping you from doing both. Run your system in a way that is as stable and reliable as possible AND spend quality time with your friend. Involve them in the effort and let them see that their affliction has motivated some positive actions. There is no reason why you can not work both sides of the equation. I do have to lean in the direction of spending quality time as a priority. Like time itself, when loved ones are gone, there is no getting them back. Love them as much as is possible and let them know how much they mean to you while you have the opportunity to do so..


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## Ensefalon (Jan 6, 2018)

yotano211 said:


> That much power and it only costs that little in power, I have about 71 graphics cards mining ETH and it cost me about .90 cents per hour to run everything at .085 cent p/kw/h


In your situation those are GPUs, and my electric bill is only 0.0173 cents to kilowatt hour, So you can see how much more kw/h an hour I can get out of a single dollar, almost 4 times as much arithmetically




lexluthermiester said:


> @Ensefalon
> A lot of good thoughts have been expressed above. My $0.02, there's nothing stopping you from doing both. Run your system in a way that is as stable and reliable as possible AND spend quality time with your friend. Involve them in the effort and let them see that their affliction has motivated some positive actions. There is no reason why you can not work both sides of the equation. I do have to lean in the direction of spending quality time as a priority. Like time itself, when loved ones are gone, there is no getting them back. Love them as much as is possible and let them know how much they mean to you while you have the opportunity to do so..



Thanks for making the situation seem alot better, especially for the one he's in, I understand more. Thank you


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## yotano211 (Jan 6, 2018)

Ensefalon said:


> In your situation those are GPUs, and my electric bill is only 0.0173 cents to kilowatt hour, So you can see how much more kw/h an hour I can get out of a single dollar, almost 4 times as much arithmetically
> 
> 
> 
> ...


WOW!!  .0173 cents per hour, where do you live!


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## Ensefalon (Jan 7, 2018)

yotano211 said:


> WOW!!  .0173 cents per hour, where do you live!



Western texas. Electricity dirt cheap just like everything else. T3 Datacenter guy out here


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