My toes are basking in the warm breeze from the back of my AMD64 server as I type this. In the summer I open a window.
Backups are done like this: # #/home/roberts # echo "Starting /home/roberts backup" >>/home/roberts/backup.log date >>/home/roberts/backup.log /usr/bin/rsync -vurltD --delete --exclude-from=/home/roberts/.rsync/exclude /home/roberts /media/usb0 >>/home/roberts /backup.log 2>&1 echo "Completed /home/roberts backup" >>/home/roberts/backup.log date >>/home/roberts/backup.log where /media/usb0 is a slow but fast-enough 1 TB USB drive that powers itself off when not being used. When that one fills up I'll get another and modify the script to rsync in multiple chunks. Crude, but effective. --Doug On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 5:25 AM, Nicholas Frost <ni...@nickorama.com> wrote: > > All the discussions of nifty hardware possibilities, along with my > > slightly flower-child "whole shebang" view, leads me to ask folks > > about their larger computing ecology and how it has impacted your > > choice of new devices, whether desktops, laptops, phones, servers, > > media (tivo, appletv, ...) and so on. > > If ecology in this case means the interaction of organisms with their > environment, then personally I find the question excellent and my > experience therewith frustrating in that ecology would dictate that I > eliminate the old-school custom dual Opteron mid-tower box at home and the > ageing PPC Macintosh G5 (dual 1.8's) and substitute a laptop for energy > conservation/efficiency. I try to use the current white Macbook for as > much work as possible for this reason. I pale at the thought of how much > electricity is used on the average weekend in Santa Fe by fleets of > Pentium/Core 2 Duo desktops idling at the various offices in town, to say > nothing of the fact that during the week said machines CPU utilization is > often < %10 while they are used largely as input devices (Excel, Word, > IE7, Firefox, etc.) rather than for processing (wish they all ran the > BOINC client!). > > I think the holistic viewpoint that you refer to Owen is wonderful in that > it invites a conversation about equanimity and creativity. I struggle > with the solipsistic "what do I (the human) do next to meet my computing > wants/needs?" rather than "how do I make smart energy consumption choices > for myself and my community (community of Life which includes everything > from arachnids to zebras)?" > > Having worked at two places in Santa Fe replete with scientists, it > strikes me that great efficiency of mentation (all for just a few > calories!) frequently occurs in environments that are shockingly > inefficient from a thermodynamic viewpoint; I refer to the buildings in > which I've worked which are anything but "green". At lunch recently I > overheard a group of people complaining that the new convention center in > Santa Fe wasn't a green building, shortly after I'd reviewed some plans > for another new commercial building with a miniscule server room. > > To return to computing ecology, I wish I had an answer, other than trying > to recycle waste heat from the average server room and re-use it to heat > office spaces in the winter. With bioinformatics, whether someone is > performing Euler short-read assembly on 400 MB of fasta data or wondering > if the Sybase database with 27 million rows is going to fall over today, > it all results in lots of waste heat from computers using lots of > electrical power with a number of runs failing and having to be re-worked > for various reasons. If only we had a Peltier noise transducer mechanism > that converted server room noise into electricity...:-) > > At home I've deployed the NSLU2-based file server, which albeit slow is > reliable and uses far fewer watts than a mid-tower equivalent, but at the > expense of the nice array of five 3.5" drives with a ZFS file system would > offer (did that at my last job and left the niftier file server there). I > try to use the laptop as much as possible and ignite the desktops and > their 80-120mm fans only when I need them for a specific task, such as > heating the garage in wintertime to keep our felines warm while the BOINC > client pulls data from ClimatePrediction.net! > > Supposedly Google has a proprietary evaporative cooling system they are > using to cool their server rooms which I find very interesting; > > http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/step2.html > > Anyway, I'm similarly interested in other people's thoughts about the > larger question of personal, professional or otherwise computing ecology. > > -Nick > > > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
