Thousands maybe - definitely not millions as they are claiming. From what I read it was setup to calculate through the screensaver. For most of the day - the computer will be in use and I would imagine/hope that they turn them off when they leave.
5,000 machines churning SETI for nine years? I'd be interested in estimates of cost.
(calculated using $0.06 per kWh, which is rather low for most people in the US)
So, 5,000 machines running 24/7/365 would cost around $1,137,600 annually (5,000 machines * $227.52 per year) in electricity usage alone.
Of that 24 hours per day, we can assume 8 hours of each day the district expected to pay for them to run, so that leaves ~16 hours the district expected the machines to be asleep or off.
24 - 8 = 16 (about 66% of the 24 hour period)
So, the admin was consuming about $12.51 per machine per month the district did not expect.
This comes out to around $750,600 the sys admin potentially cost the district, for a single year. He ran this scheme for 9 years -- so...
$750,600 per year * 9 years = $6,755,400 in additional electricity costs
Keep in mind this is likely rather low, since most places in the US have a significantly higher per kWh fee than the $0.06 per kWh used in these calculations.
I'm certain that this sum alone was enough cause to terminate the sys admin.
Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on...
PSU's arent light bulbs. A "350 watt" psu doens't draw 350 watts. That's the theoretical maximum you can draw from it. Sure, SETI was probably drawing a higher load than idle, vs off, but I highly doubt it was drawing 100%.
Even more complicated is the heat. If they lived in a cool climate, at least some of the waste heat that was emitted would have been absorbed by the building, which they are (presumably) paying to heat at least a few months of the year.
Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?
15 years ago, the power difference was probably smaller, maybe quite a bit smaller -- modern CPUs are better optimized for low idle power.
Also, bear in mind that PSUs do not use their full rating unless the hardware they are powering requires it. [0] Your number could easily be double what the machines actually used, if the PSU was somewhat oversized, as they typically are.
[0]: https://superuser.com/questions/106792/does-a-power-supply-d...
That's assuming they didn't use computers. Your calculation assumes that the computer uses a full 350+ watts of electricity. If it had a 350 watt PSU and was drawing that full load - it would shutdown (I've had this happen). Even then the CPU doesn't require 350 watts of power [1]. The only device that I know of that will use and designed to use a full load is a bitcoin miner.
Taking in consideration that these computers might have been left on already. I would argue that he used MAYBE an extra 50 watts of electricity [2]. So assuming $0.10/kw/hr (which is the cost of where I live) - he wasted a whopping $0.12/day or ~$50/year.
You have to take into account if the computers were already on. He didn't waste electricity because someone left their computer on - his "waste" would be electricity use that is above that of an "idle computer". It should also be pointed out that if the computer has Mcafee or some other crappy AV the CPU usage would be 100% anyways due to poor programming of the AV software (I have personally seen this many times and you don't know how many times people complain about their slow computer because the AV is using 100% of the CPU).
There is no way he wasted $7m - and even if he did and no one noticed that is part of a larger problem. Besides they only claim he wasted $1.2m - $1.6m [3] - with no evidence of how they came up with that number. That is saying he managed to waste over $100k/year (over 9 years) in equipment purchases, electricity etc - and NO ONE noticed this? I find it hard to believe that the people managing the budget were like "$100k unaccounted for this year? no big deal...". And even if it was accounted for and signed off - there should be 2 people fired - his and the guy who approved the purchase.
Even from the article:
> would find that in a middle of a lesson, the SMART Board had turned off.
This has happened to me personally on my own laptop. Not because I was mining bitcoins or running seti@home. In fact I've seen them installed and they are such POS that no instructor I know actually uses it as a SMART board.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...
[2] http://i.stack.imgur.com/4HQPY.png
[3] http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130se...
Let's say 100W per computer running at full blast, and assume 12 cents per kWh for electricity. Running for 9 years straight, that's about 5 million dollars. If they're running for 16 hours/day then it's more like 3 million dollars. Adjust other factors to taste, but "millions" sounds pretty reasonable.
Where I live, electricity costs about 20 cents per kWh. 0.2dollars * 6000kWh * 365days * 9years = $3.94 million.
Running a processor at an extra (grossly exaggerating here) few watts + an extra 5-10 watts for fans, LEDs, etc don't amount to much. Especially when you consider that all electricity is paid for by the Thousand-Watts/Hour.
