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Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

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Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#31
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the website ( https://vectordash.com/hosting/ ) they use a highly isolated Ubuntu image, so the person hosting the service shouldn't have access to the VM with your model or data on it. It would be nice if there was some third party audit of the software though, the models, the code, and even the training data can be pretty sensitive for researchers.

there is no way to "highly isolate" a VM from a host.

[deleted]

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LXC unprivileged containers are actually pretty secure by design. The Canonical LXC page does a pretty great job of explaining why: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/security/

Please (OP, and others allowing access to your machines), be cautious on this front. While LXC unprivileged containers are a start at isolation, LXC containers + GPU passthrough has a much, much larger attack surface (the nvidia binary blob drivers are complex and out of your control). The most common ways of giving GPU access to a container involve installing the CUDA drivers in the host and simply allowing the cont…

This is a very, very valid point. I'm going to mention this on the website & even advise people to run the client on an isolated machine (instead of their daily driver gaming rig).

Thank you for pointing this out.

Also, one of my friends working on this project is a sophomore in the CS dept at CMU, and given your interest in distributed systems & DL, would it be possible to meet up for a couple of minutes and discuss security a bit more in depth? (if yes, I'll shoot you an email)

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#34

Creator of Vectordash here! If you have any questions about the platform, feel free to ask away! P.S. I'm @samin100 on Twitter if you enjoy tweets about GPUs!

This is awesome. Is it necessary that the PC remain fully online throughout the day? I wouldn't mind putting my PC out there but sometimes when I get back from work my modem or router has crapped out and I need to restart things (not the PC), and I've been told it's a few thousand (over 3, actually) to wire up the house with Ethernet so I live with the status quo for now

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please (OP, and others allowing access to your machines), be cautious on this front. While LXC unprivileged containers are a start at isolation, LXC containers + GPU passthrough has a much, much larger attack surface (the nvidia binary blob drivers are complex and out of your control). The most common ways of giving GPU access to a container involve installing the CUDA drivers in the host and simply allowing the cont…

This is a very, very valid point. I'm going to mention this on the website & even advise people to run the client on an isolated machine (instead of their daily driver gaming rig). Thank you for pointing this out. Also, one of my friends working on this project is a sophomore in the CS dept at CMU, and given your interest in distributed systems & DL, would it be possible to meet up for a couple of minutes and discuss…

Happy to. Drop me a note.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#36
post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

You don't verify every task. You verify some percent of them at random. And blacklist the people who cheat the system (Maybe with some leeway because random memory errors are a thing with consumer GPUs.)

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#37
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is no way to "highly isolate" a VM from a host.

But there is (though I think they don't use it): TPM based host attestation.

The microsoft secureboot golden key got leaked, anything based on secureboot as a root of trust is 100% blown wide open.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170604013028/https://rol.im/se...

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank ya! Plus the way it's setup right now, you don't pay for anything until you done and satisfied with a session! I just want both parties to be happy with the GPU compute transaction :)

This looks awesome, I just submitted a hosting application. I only have a single GTX 1060 on a Ryzen board, but I only use it 3-4 hours per day and I'm good with its downtime being used for passive income. Hopefully someone will find it useful. One question, I noticed you only pay in crypto right now, do you plan to offer USD or other fiat currencies in the future? Crypto isn't a problem for me (I don't mine crypto m…

I was thinking about paying out in fiat, but crypto is so much easier because of no fees, instant transactions, and not having to deal with various currencies.

While something like Stripe Connect may be useful, the fees are unreasonable for smaller transactions. A quick hack to cash out to crypto is to use your Coinbase wallet address as the payout address, and just sell off the crypto the moment it hits your wallet.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#39

Creator of Vectordash here! If you have any questions about the platform, feel free to ask away! P.S. I'm @samin100 on Twitter if you enjoy tweets about GPUs!

This is awesome. Is it necessary that the PC remain fully online throughout the day? I wouldn't mind putting my PC out there but sometimes when I get back from work my modem or router has crapped out and I need to restart things (not the PC), and I've been told it's a few thousand (over 3, actually) to wire up the house with Ethernet so I live with the status quo for now

You can list your computer for as long as you like! It's up to the ML/AI researchers to decide which machines they want to use based on the specs they see, and for how long.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#40

Creator of Vectordash here! If you have any questions about the platform, feel free to ask away! P.S. I'm @samin100 on Twitter if you enjoy tweets about GPUs!

I saw people on the Reddit thread saying the Ubuntu requirement was a showstopper for a lot of them.

You might look into the Win 10 linux support, Ubuntu is one o the supported distros. Not sure if it would have full access to resources, have just used it a bit at work and setup was super simple.

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