Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing

Post by ry0ohki » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 11:24 PM UTC

adamsmith wrote: post #25

soupboy wrote: post #21

From [1] - "Our users volunteer their idle compute resources because they want to be part of something valuable to the world. We believe that this is a motivator far more powerful than paying people a small amount of money every month.". Yeah, I don't think that is going to work, especially because you are for-profit organization not SETI [1] - https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe

There's a surprising behavioral economics result that says people will do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money. A check in the mail for a dollar or two every month isn't as compelling as being part of a group effort. And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not p…

Post by justinsb » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 11:28 PM UTC

larrys wrote: post #63

"While we allow Internet traffic from software doing compuations on our platform, it is all proxied seamlessly through a small set of computers operated by Gridspot." Seems that that small set of computers and IP addresses could be used to do the ill deeds of a bad actor. "Run anything" "Get SSH root access to each Linux instance." So exactly what is to prevent someone from spamming here and how would gridspot even k…

Post by cycrutchfield » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 11:33 PM UTC

ry0ohki wrote: post #71

adamsmith wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising behavioral economics result that says people will do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money. A check in the mail for a dollar or two every month isn't as compelling as being part of a group effort. And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not p…

You have 100k computers running this? How come I've never heard of it and don't see a place to sign up to be a host computer?

Post by josscrowcroft » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 11:38 PM UTC

adamsmith wrote: post #28

panarky wrote: post #26

This would be perfect for crawling with a large number of distinct IP addresses, or for fighting DDOS attacks. However: "All network traffic is proxied through a central data center we maintain." https://gridspot.com/compute/api_help

Yeah, to be honest we're trying to avoid the business of selling wholesale access to a lot of IP addresses, hence the proxying of traffic. If there are specific, legitimate uses for a large number of IPs, for example fighting DDOS, then that might be something we should build!

Post by panarky » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 11:41 PM UTC

adamsmith wrote: post #52

panarky wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possible bug is that the UI reports 1.56 core-hours used, but my single-core instance has only been running 24 minutes.

Ok!, the two instances you were seeing were duplicate listings of the same instance. That bug was introduced a few days ago by some database optimizations, and is now fixed! Thanks for reporting it. The 1.56 core-hours is mostly from inst_KGN6tZdFgoeL2C9KPKBsNA which has four physical cpus and has been running for almost an hour at this point. Thanks so much for trying this out!!!