Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 129 posts

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

#91

Post by freech »

dpwm wrote: 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…

The person who runs the platform could do some calculations themselves and then throw people out if there's a disagreement.

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

#92

Post by largote »

navinsylvester wrote: post #82
boulos wrote: post #65

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and launched Preemptible VMs). Cool! Like you, I wish people would make productive use of spare cycles. Can I suggest you add a note comparing this to BOINC/gridcoin as well? I think your marketplace is a better idea, but because of the security implications dgacmu pointed out downthread, it shouldn’t be treated lightly. Also, I really like your white paper ( https://vectordash.com…

We at Gridmarkets have cracked this one(spare cycles) and are now further enhancing the model.

That's a nice word-salad you got there.

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

#93

Post by largote »

0xfaded wrote: post #5
zawerf wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this good for gamers? They get to sell their idle gpu time and basically get a gpu for free. If he's really paying 2x more than cryptomining, this translates to paying off a gtx 1080 in a few months even taking into account electricity costs.

How do GPU's "wear", or in other words degrade with use. I often see people stating they would not buy an ex-miner GPU because of it's hard life.

The silicon itself gets effectively no wear and the board is actually better because it doesn't get heat-cycled as much.

The fans are in a bit worse shape, but those tend to be easily replaceable if they fail.

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

#94

Post by dpwm »

Samin100 wrote: post #19
dpwm wrote: 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…

It's pretty much letting people with GPUs become a sort of 'mini-cloud provider'. There's no job queue or fancy distributing computing setup. We just let you SSH into a container on someone's computer, and pay for the time used. I was doing a lot of fun deep learning projects on the side & would often Venmo my friend who was mining Ethereum to use his GPU to train my models. He made more and I paid less than AWS spot…

I somehow missed the paragraph where you said about building the platform and the link to the service. This looks awesome then.

As somebody who's spent a silly amount of money on EC2 spot instances to train models, I would certainly overlook the odd dodgy result for access to those GPUs at those prices.

I just hope you find a way so that the ingenious but disreputable people that seem to come when money's to be gained don't ruin it for everyone. However, I wish you every success.

I imagine you could do some kind of hardware fingerprinting, but there's nothing stopping a really bad actor from modifying the kernel to pretend to have a GPU and NaN on allocation. I suppose I'm descending into absurd levels of distrusting trust that may never happen.

I also foresee annoying customers who say they only get back NaNs but this is down to instabilities in their training and they flood any reporting of bad actors that you have.

I don't believe either are actually terminal with the right incentives.

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

#95

Post by dmurray »

jonhohle wrote: post #59
sangnoir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty much letting people with GPUs become a sort of 'mini-cloud provider'. There's no job queue or fancy distributing computing setup. We just let you SSH into a container on someone's computer, and pay for the time used. I had the same idea a few days ago - but in my head, the process would be wrapped up as a "cryptocurrency" where the AI researchers pay real money and the "proof of work" is useful/"real" w…

> the first is that how do you verify that the hardware owner is running the real job an not NOOP'ing and sending false results? Consensus. Have _n_ nodes perform the same work (if it’s deterministic), and only accept (and pay) if all the nodes match - or at least the nodes that were part of the majority I don’t think this would be considerably different from SETI or folding@home, which have been going on for around…

It would work well for problems that are computationally hard to solve, but easy to verify solutions for. Unfortunately, such problems are ubiquitous in cryptocurrency, but rare in machine learning.

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

#96

Post by evanb »

ISL wrote: post #78

We're coming into the warm seasons in the northern hemisphere, but if this effort survives into autumn, it'll be quite tempting for home-heating. Stoked to see distributed-compute as a paying service making another try. One of these days, it is going to fly.

People are trying this for mining: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/08/qarnot-unveils-a-cryptocur...

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

#97

Post by ezoe »

As others have already pointed out, there are trust issues.

The seller can fake the computation to return bogus result is one thing.

But even if there is no malicious intent, the resulting computation is still ended up bogus result, the malfunction of the hardware.

Commodity hardware isn't that reliable and there are so many commodity GPUs in the wild that looks like working but return incorrect result.

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

#98

Post by sho »

Donzo wrote: post #90
sho wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saw a panel with the golem people just last night, and sure enough this question came up. The short answer is that they don't have a solution yet and IMO their thinking was no more advanced than what I'm seeing on this thread.

Give them some time. They are solving many large, complex problems. It looks like they're pretty close to having something that works too.

How is their problem substantially different from this project? Apart of course from the overheard and complexity caused by trying to force what should probably just be a centralised service into a blockchain.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great idea. I just don't see why it needs a blockchain and all the associated trustless infrastructure. Even nicehash doesn't bother with all that.

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

#99

Post by QasimK »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #67

Great idea and I am glad somebody actually tries to make an implementation. But unfortunately this won't replace mining: the large scale mining farms have high end GPUs in their rigs, but the rest of the HW is very low end, because that works perfectly for mining and they want their ROI as low as possible. I have a 6 GTX 1070 GPU rig, which would be decent GPUs for AI/ML, but the rest of the rig has a Celeron CPU, 4g…

The ones that train on a GPU? I'm not sure the rest of the system will have that much of an impact.

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

#100

Post by JensRex »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #37
lostmsu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If you don't want to claw your eyes out while reading:

https://bpaste.net/show/571ef50296ac

Post reply on HN