OMG this is so silly!
If he was smart he would just fess up.
this is a harmless screen save program.
It wakes up when the computer IS NOT IN USE and does some processing of data.
He should not have installed it without permission, but it is harmless and does not waste resources- it only works when computers are on and sitting IDLE anyway
It looks to me like the sysadmin committed a minor breach of protocol that was seized upon by an office-politics enemy.
It depends on whether the program kept the computer from going into sleep mode where it would use less energy. And whether he influenced the schools policy to leave the computers on.
See my cost analysis in post 18
The total hours available (assuming pc’s left on 24*7*365) would be 394 million hours ,, if you assume 40 weeks a year , 8 hours a day 5 days a week of on time for 9 years you still have 72 million hours ,,, if this is a cpu intensive analysis program and it runs only during slack time you could burn a lot of electricity ,, the $1.6M pricetag sounds low.
on 65nm processors, the power draw of 5,000 processors running 10 months a year from 6pm (or whatever) to 6AM ( or whatever) could cost almost $150,000 a year easily.
Except he’s been doing it for 9 years, which means the costs were greater during the mid 2000’s as the processors were energy hogs.
SETI itself estimates that the program will shorten the lifespan of cpus and mobo components by at least 10%. (From some Q&A the head researchers had in the last few years) Multiply that by 5,000 computers. And all of the defendant’s overtime costs to service all the fried components he fried.
This guy will be thrown into gen pop, hope he takes some self defense lessons right quick.