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

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

#101

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

vld wrote: post #90
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…

Wow, really, six figures? 250 results for "gridspot.com" on google, and yet you have 100000+ computers running this software? I want to hire you! I'll pay you 10 figures/month!

This comment is quite rude, but I still haven't seen an answer for this yet. How did you get all these users to donate their computers even though nobody seems to have heard of you yet? Something seems fishy, and I wish you'd answer.

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

#102

Post by nmridul »

heretohelp wrote: post #69
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it says it right on the page. It's for non-privacy-sensitive applications.

Presumably you are using the results of the distributed system's work for something. Can you trust those results from people who can't keep a web server alive?

Why the hatred ?

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

#103

Post by nmridul »

Is it possible for someone to lend the idle time of their VPS / dedicated web Servers in return for cash ? People could run their websites without issue as most of the time, they may not be using it to full capacity. And you will get better connection (better than DSL speed) and better performance machines (server grade). Could be a win win for everyone.

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

TomatoTomato wrote: post #83
lost-theory wrote: post #19

How do they handle security? If the software they're using to virtualize these instances is exploitable, then you could break into the host machine and do whatever you like with it.

I agree, theres a level of trust when you use hosting providers like Amazon and heroku. With this, there's no way i'd do anything remotely sensitive with one of these boxes.

[deleted]

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

#105

Post by staunch »

qeorge wrote: post #14

I'm curious to see if this works. "SETI but paid" is a very tempting idea, but we could never get the back of the envelope math to work out to the point where we could pay the contributors anything compelling (e.g., enough to offset their power cost). I guess you can get a few people to sign-up for fun, but we could never come up with a reason other than serendipity that would make people donate their CPU time for us…

Maybe turn it into a raffle? Every month a random VM host gets a huge prize (all the money that would have been distributed)?

If the service was really successful you could be giving out n * $100k prizes every month. Just treat it like the (much cheaper) server hosting bill.

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

#107

Post by deno »

panarky wrote: post #86

If VMs are running on hardware Gridspot doesn't control, and if the filesystem isn't encrypted, how is my data secured? At $0.002 per hour I'm actually OK with zero security, but it will limit the types of jobs that I'll use Gridspot for.

If the data is not confidential, but you’re worried about someone messing with your computations, it still might be worthwhile to use defensive strategy and just run the same task multiple times on separate instances and compare results before accepting output. Since the task can be scheduled in parallel, there’s no significant overhead and it’s still way cheaper than Amazon/Google.

It’s not exactly replacement for EC2, but there’s a lot of applications that would fit Gridspot just fine.

But I guess one has to be much more aware of all the security issues when writing for a platform like this. The Gridspot folks should perhaps consider creating solid list of best-practice guidelines.

Now can someone also create Gridspot for storage? :)

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

#108

Post by alexkcd »

panarky wrote: post #86

If VMs are running on hardware Gridspot doesn't control, and if the filesystem isn't encrypted, how is my data secured? At $0.002 per hour I'm actually OK with zero security, but it will limit the types of jobs that I'll use Gridspot for.

Same here. It would be great to get end-to-end encryption, but I don't think that this is currently practical.

Some recent research [1] has shown that it's theoretically possible to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. But from what I remember, in practice the computation becomes orders of magnitude slower than on the unencrypted counterpart.

[1] http://crypto.stanford.edu/craig/easy-fhe.pdf

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

#110

Post by damian2000 »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #101
vld wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, really, six figures? 250 results for "gridspot.com" on google, and yet you have 100000+ computers running this software? I want to hire you! I'll pay you 10 figures/month!

This comment is quite rude, but I still haven't seen an answer for this yet. How did you get all these users to donate their computers even though nobody seems to have heard of you yet? Something seems fishy, and I wish you'd answer.

Fake it till you make it? I don't know for sure, but could they be subsidising the launch by running instances on EC2? ... When they get enough hosts signed up, switch over to their distributed model, or even run a hybrid combination to handle demand spikes.
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