I recently began to work at a company that specializes in helping researchers parallelize scientific problems and programs and utilize the processing capabilities of GPUs to speed up problems which fit the architecture well. Lately I found out that one of my colleagues has been utilizing the spare machines and GPU cards to mine bit-coins during off-hours such as evenings, nights and weekends. He has set his programs to automatically go into a sleeping state if they detect that other processes are trying to access the resources.
The total worth of currency he has made so far are trivial amounts at best. He claims that the machines are not doing anything during these off-hours and that he isn't doing any harm to anyone. He fails to realize that this is costing the company electricity and the constant full capacity usage of the machines are generating a lot of heat. Additionally this unauthorized usage of the company assets is not allowed in our contracts, at least not in mine. I fear that if this behaviour escalates there will eventually be an investigation into the usage of the machines and more control, making all employees' lives harder. The reason I have not yet gone to management is that I am still fairly new here and I do not know who my allies are. How should I act in this situation?