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Originally Posted by Starkler
Im not interested for the reason that there is no such thing as "free cpu cycles".
When your cpu is idle it is at minimum power consumption. When working hard crunching numbers the power consumption is much greater, your cpu heats up and you pay for it on your electricity bill. Its about the equivalent of constantly running another light bulb in the home.
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The difference to your computer's power usage is not that big, especially if you don't have cpu frequency and voltage scaling operating (which cuts back clockspeed and voltage during idle periods). Your CPU is only one part of the whole equation and the power difference between 0% CPU and 100% CPU is under 2x. 0% CPU != 0 (or even almost 0) power usage. And the CPU power usage is not the whole story either. So when you are not doing anything with your CPU you are pretty much wasting power because most of the power demand is still there but it's being used for nothing.
I don't think SETI@Home is the project most worthy of your (the proposed Ice in space team) CPU time. They have been wallowing in cheap processing power for years. I believe that it's time for other projects to get access to this resource. In windows I only give 1/3 of my time to SETI and in Linux I don't run it at all. IIRC, in seti classic I have around 2000 WU and in Boinc seti I have around 12000 credits, so I think I've contributed enough to their project. Einstein at home has my computer's attention now, even though the processing is damn slow under linux (about 0.5x windows speed) and you can't compile your own client to improve this.