Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S...
by logfromblammo on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @04:05PM
(#10229448)
During the winter months, the electric heaters that were also performing computation would supplement the normal dumb heaters. The cost of electricity or fuel saved on heating should therefore be subtracted from the cost of running @Home. Likewise, additional cooling costs would have to be added for the summer months.
Once those kWh are used in the CPU, they don't just disappear. They become heat.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414050/computer-cluster...
Some yes, but there's a lot of difference between a machine idling at 0% CPU and one fully loaded with SETI or Folding and running 100% all the time.
Would be even more worse now with deep sleep states and GPGPU, but even back then the difference between an idle and a fully loaded machine was absolutely significant.