Too Many Computers

Not counting my work laptop, I have 3 desktops, 4 laptops and a Raspberry Pi in my house. Out of these, I regularly use two of the laptops and one desktop. The rest are all older machines that I run Linux experiments on. I have been meaning to donate them to a local charity but I worry that they may just end up in a landfill as e-waste.

Last summer, I had an idea about a small way in which I could contribute to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. I set up three of the computers to run as 24/7 distributed computing nodes for scientific modeling. Theses are the two projects that I support.

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Folding@Home

I turned the computers off once the weather warmed up since running three CPUs at 100% was going to be a stress on the house’s air conditioning. Now that winter is back and the pandemic is still raging, I have the computers running again.

However I plan to consolidate down to a desktop, a travel laptop, a coding laptop and a low power home server by this time next year.