[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What fuel for my data furnace?
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       Ask HN: What fuel for my data furnace?
        
       I have a server with two old 6-core Xeon CPUs in it. In winter I
       used to run it full tilt on SETI and get a noticeable bump in room
       temperature.  Now that SETI is mothballed, what charity or mining
       software would you recommend I run? Anything more productive than
       re-calculating pi is my goal.
        
       Author : heartag
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2023-12-08 21:57 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | slater wrote:
       | May I interest you in the magical world of... ... CRYPTO
       | MINING???
        
         | heartag wrote:
         | My very uninformed understanding is that asic miners made cpu
         | mining irrelevant a while back. Is that not the case?
        
           | I_Am_Nous wrote:
           | Depends on the cryptocurrency. Some are designed to be
           | intentionally difficult-to-impossible to optimize with an
           | asic, with Monero being the big one I think is most well
           | known.
        
           | tomatovole wrote:
           | This is not true for all crypto coins. A small proportion of
           | mining hash functions are deliberately designed to thwart
           | ASICs, e.g. https://github.com/tevador/RandomX. It's a cat-
           | and-mouse game, though: CryptoNight was designed to fulfill
           | the same role, but ultimately failed:
           | https://monerodocs.org/proof-of-work/cryptonight/.
        
       | focusedone wrote:
       | (List of Volunteer Computing Projects)[https://en.wikipedia.org/w
       | iki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...]
       | 
       | There's quite a few out there, most of which are BOINC based.
       | Just a few clicks on your existing SETI setup and you'll be
       | turning electrons into radiant heat.
        
         | focusedone wrote:
         | Also I don't know how to markdown.
        
           | jabroni_salad wrote:
           | HN doesnt let you make pretty hyperlinks, it's why another
           | comment in the thread has numbered footnotes instead.
        
         | heartag wrote:
         | Thank you!
        
       | n3t wrote:
       | I run fishnet[0] to help Lichess[1] analyze chess games.
       | 
       | [0]: https://github.com/lichess-org/fishnet [1]:
       | https://lichess.org/
        
         | joenot443 wrote:
         | This is super cool. Lichess deserves all its praise and more,
         | what a great idea.
        
       | mondobe wrote:
       | One idea is the World Community grid, a lot of great projects for
       | different causes. The link below is the Dinosaur Comics team
       | (slightly biased here), but there are plenty of others. Haven't
       | researched it very much, but this just popped into my head.
       | 
       | https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?team...
        
       | I_Am_Nous wrote:
       | My personal recommendation would be Folding@Home[1]. Protein
       | folding is an insanely complex thing life does and they use
       | distributed computing to try to solve the large problems.
       | 
       | 1. https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-08 23:01 UTC)