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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

#111

Post by TrainedMonkey »

mattkrause wrote: post #58
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is identical to the problem blockchain solves - hard to solve, but easy to verify. For example, if the workload is training a neural network on a set of samples it is relatively cheap verify performance on a training sample. Alternatively you could give X% of tasks to multiple workers for cross checking. In your example X% is 100%, but it does not have to be that high.

Say you do a single feedforward pass. How do you verify that its output is the result of a trained network-and particularly a completely trained one?

Aside from doing the same work X% of the time I can think of only one other option. The network could be overloaded with additional nodes such that it would also compute some function on the input data with the known output. For example a hashing function. Having said that, single pass does not strike me as a particularly useful unit of work. You would want to batch the samples, and that leads back to a strategy of verifying a portion of them based on the host trust metric.

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

#112

Post by chillee »

dmurray wrote: post #95
jonhohle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, not really. Training a model is one such task. It's hard to train a network but easy to verify that it has good performance (training vs inference).

The real problem here, I believe, and I've seen this idea pop up several times on hackernews, is that almost no machine learning tasks are progress free.

If the cryptocurrency is just paid out to the person who solves the task first in a non-progress free problem, then the person with the fastest GPU would mine all the coins and nobody else can participate. One of the key ideas behind proof of work is that if two people have the same compute, and person A has a headstart, if person A has not succeeded by the time person B starts, they'll have the same probability of mining a block.

People seem to be just jumping on the crypto bandwagon and trying to come up with "useful" proof of work, but it's a pretty difficult task.

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

#113

Post by arbie »

ColanR wrote: post #108
Samin100 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happens if the computer is taken offline before the task is done?

The GPU owner gets no payment for the entire task.

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

#114

Post by Donzo »

sho wrote: post #98
Donzo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose the approach by the Golem team is substantially different because the ideology associated with it.

What you see as “trying to force what should probably just be a centralized service,” I see as “innovating a new approach to powering decentralized architecture.”

I’m not saying you’re wrong. It would be easier to solve the problem using existing tool sets and more mature protocols. Yet, I’m pretty sure that the Golem team is doing something right. So there’s that. Maybe this isn’t a zerosum thing.

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

#115

Post by mbajkowski »

joshumax wrote: post #50
Samin100 wrote: post #19

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 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…

Instead of having the party ssh into a VM installed on the user's machine, potentially exposing a high majority of the user's codebase, have you considered spinning up temporary containers on your back-end and having contributors install something like remote CUDA or remote OpenCL so that only the GPU kernels are transferred to the contributor, who's client software polls a network queue checking to see what kernel s…

Good idea from the perspective of not exposing the code base. However, technologies such as remote Cuda/OpenCL which rely on remote execution of compute kernels in general require high-bandwidth and low-latency connectivity - this is especially true for deep learning / AI workloads, not necessarily for other applications which may have a higher computer to data transfer / synchronization ratios. The latency on a typical internet connection will likely stall the GPUs on a remote system, yielding little compute benefit.

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

#116

Post by sho »

Donzo wrote: post #114
sho wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose the approach by the Golem team is substantially different because the ideology associated with it. What you see as “trying to force what should probably just be a centralized service,” I see as “innovating a new approach to powering decentralized architecture.” I’m not saying you’re wrong. It would be easier to solve the problem using existing tool sets and more mature protocols. Yet, I’m pretty sure that t…

> I’m pretty sure that the Golem team is doing something right

I'm not at all convinced that the golem team have any particular insight to solve this obvious and common problem that everyone else doesn't have. And frankly I think that the overhead of running unnecessary infrastructure will render them price-uncompetitive to any reasonable centralised provider. In short, I predict they will fail.

But eh, they raised USD$8m and I didn't, so what do I know.

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

#118

Post by Donzo »

sho wrote: post #116
Donzo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the approach by the Golem team is substantially different because the ideology associated with it. What you see as “trying to force what should probably just be a centralized service,” I see as “innovating a new approach to powering decentralized architecture.” I’m not saying you’re wrong. It would be easier to solve the problem using existing tool sets and more mature protocols. Yet, I’m pretty sure that t…

> I’m pretty sure that the Golem team is doing something right I'm not at all convinced that the golem team have any particular insight to solve this obvious and common problem that everyone else doesn't have. And frankly I think that the overhead of running unnecessary infrastructure will render them price-uncompetitive to any reasonable centralised provider. In short, I predict they will fail. But eh, they raised U…

>In short, I predict they will fail.

I guess that's why we're sitting in different camps.

One advantage that the Golem team has over a centralized, proprietary solution is the open nature of the project:

https://github.com/golemfactory/golem

The Golem team doesn't necessarily need to solve every problem. Being built on top of the Ethereum Network is advantageous. If they make an appealing, open platform with potential, maybe other developers will pick up the ball and run with it to power their own ends.

In short, I predict that they will succeed.

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

#119

Post by bhouston »

maxmcd wrote: post #109
tgtweak wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the cheapest hourly for a pre-emptive P100 instance?

https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=fb75f2cf-3f... $533/mo

And a NVIDIA GeForce 1080 TI is roughly $1000 USD right now (and should be $800 if cryptocurrency wasn't inflating the prices):

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=390&sort=pri...

Cloud computing is so ridiculously expensive for GPUs.

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

#120

Post by ezoe »

alkonaut wrote: post #103
ezoe wrote: post #97

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.

all of these issues can be worked around by random validation, sumbitting all/some blocks to multiple people (redundant calculation). This is no different from existing efforts such as SETI@Homr and Folding@Home. The difference being the compensation which increases the incentive for fraud. The key to the trust issue is not trusting the remote computer, because you can’t. You have to validate somehow.

That solution requires that all computation is deterministic and the result of computation can be easily comparable. I think not all the computation is that simple.
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