Costs For Volunteer Computing Participants
- Increased power consumption. A CPU that is idle generally has lower power consumption than when it is active. The desire to participate may also cause the volunteer to leave the PC on overnight, or to disable power-saving features like suspend. Additionally, if adequate cooling is not in place, this constant load on the volunteer's CPU can cause it to overheat.
- Decreased performance of the PC. If the volunteer computing application attempts to run while the computer is in use, it may impact performance of the PC. This is due to increased CPU contention, CPU cache contention, disk I/O contention, and network I/O contention. If RAM is a limitation, increased disk cache misses and/or increased paging can result. Volunteer computing applications typically execute at a lower CPU scheduling priority, which helps to alleviate CPU contention.
These effects may or may not be noticeable, and even if they are noticeable, the volunteer might choose to continue participating. However the increased power consumption can be remedied to some extent by setting the option of desired processor usage percent, that is available e.g. in BOINC client.
Read more about this topic: Volunteer Computing
Famous quotes containing the words costs, volunteer and/or participants:
“When over Catholics the ocean rolls,
They must wait several weeks before a mass
Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals,
Because, till people know what’s come to pass,
They won’t lay out their money on the dead—
It costs three francs for every mass that’s said.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)