We are currently building a LEED/Passive house and I am trying to find a way to integrate a boinc server as the heating supply in winter.
The heating requirement would be +- 1800watts at-10°C

I have the following questions :

How can I communicate with the boinc client to throttle the calculation % related to the indoor/outdoor temperature.

I want to get a high throughput per watthour consumed. Where can I compare the cpu/gpu power consumption and the number of points generated?

Where can i find similar projects done before?


PS: If needed, i can do some development to make this work.

BOINC clients can be controlled remotely as described here:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/GuiRpc
In particular, you can turn computation on/off,
or change the # of CPUs or % of CPU time that's used.
BOINC provides C++ bindings for these RPCs;
other people have developed Java and C# bindings.
Let me know if you need help with this.

In general, GPUs get more credit per watt than CPUs.
The ideal "BOINC heater" would probably be a box
with several AMD GPUs.

-- David

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Hi! I got the same issue.

I think about buying a usb Stick Temp gauge and use the program to start a auto-clicking software that will desable the GPU at 23C.

I have sadly no skill in programming.

Hi! I got the same issue.

Not exactly the same issue then, if you do not want the GPU to heat up too much. The original poster wants to heat his house with the heat output of his new computer. Is that what you want?

if not, check out Efmer Tthrottle, as that will do what you want (on Windows then at least).

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Aren't there efficiency requirements for obtaining a LEED rating? I would say that heating your house by PC is one of the least efficient furnaces around. You might recoup some "savings" with it augmenting your primary heat source in the winter, and by scaling back/suspending work in the summer when cooling would be needed... But I think you'll find it will cost you a lot to get any usable heat out of the deal. I know there are some companies with large server farms that use them for passive heating, but we're talking the likes of Facebook and Google.

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