Re: power consumption

Ah yes, opening the bag of worms... Of course if we all "paused"
life, then that would keep the planet going too, of course there
isn't much chance you'll get many people to sign on to that. As for
the electricity and your "carbon dioxide", there are multiple ways
the electricity is generated besides just carbon generating methods.

Trying to stay nice here, it is good you want to play the
conservation ticket and that is something everyone has to take into
account in everything they do in life. As for RC5 specifically,
there is less electricity wasted on RC5 than what the computer
gaming entertainment world consumes around the planet, or any of a
multitude of things, from going to the movies to all the energy
wasted making all those clothes that women change their styles with
year to year. How much electricity is wasted keeping all those
flood lights going during the night time football, soccer, baseball
and other games around the planet? Quite a bit more than RC5 is
going to consume. There is this thing called perspective.

On 07/02/2012 02:43 PM, Relkin, Paul wrote:

A 2012 Radeon HD 7970 GPU uses 215
additional watts when crunching RC5-72. Completing the rest of
RC5-72 using only Radeon HD 7970s would consume 77 million
kilowatt hours of electricity. If participants pay 10 cents per
kilowatt hour, they would be donating $7.7 million of
electricity. This would emit about 100 million pounds of carbon
dioxide, as much as 5 million gallons of gas. Currently, most
distributed.net clients are running on hardware that is less
efficient than that.

Until 2009, RC5-72 ran entirely on CPUs rather
than GPUs. In the first 6 years of RC5-72
(2002 to 2008), distributed.net caused
thousands of CPUs to run at maximum power. The
progress made by these CPUs is barely
significant. The total keyspace completed
before 2009 could now be processed in the same
amount of time by only 38 Radeon HD 7970 GPUs,
saving a lot of electricity.

I have participated in distributed.net since
2006 but I don't think it is ethical to
continue crunching without evaluating the
environmental impact. Processing speed and
energy efficiency are improving exponentially.
If distributed.net was paused for a few years,
the cost to participants and the environment
could be cut exponentially.

It's exciting that it is becoming increasingly
feasible to crack RC5-72. But for now, I'm not
sure that cracking the secret message a few
years sooner is worth the environmental and
economic consequences of crunching on the less
efficient hardware available today.

Paul Relkin

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