IT chief loses job, SETI@home cited as reason

A report on Network World talked about how the IT director at Arizona's Higley Unified School District lost his job following an investigation of "suspicious activities" across the 5,000-plus computers under him. This includes the running of the SETI@home distributing computing over the last 10 years. The school district says this has resulted in between $1.2 million and $1.6 million in energy and other associated costs.

Certainly, this has generated plenty of strong and varied responses. Amid the uproar, what appears to be missed by most parties is the fact that the running of SETI@home does not appear to be the only reason for firing Brad Niesluchowski. Christopher Dawson of ZDNet explored the issue, concluding that "As it turns out, the guy really just wasn't very good at his job. Unfortunately, the school system used the distributed computing issue as a primary reason to terminate him."

Attempting to clarify matters, school superintendent Denise Birdwell was quoted as saying, "We support educational research and we would have supported cancer research but we however as an educational institutional do not support the search of ET."

Yet are companies and schools prepared to pay a higher energy bill for distributed projects not directly related to their key job? Perhaps the situation was different some years ago, when computers consumed the same amount of energy regardless of whether they were idle or not. Newer computers however, can throttle down their clock rates when idle, greatly reducing their power consumption.

With all the talk of green computing, perhaps this is a topic that needs to be independently reexamined.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World
- check out this article at ZDNet

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