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

61–70 of 129 posts

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

#61

Post by ThrustVectoring »

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…

Couldn't you embed a task or sub-task with a known result and throw out responses from nodes that didn't successfully process the sub-task?

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

#62

Post by zhoujianfu »

Samin100 wrote: post #38
morganvachon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why no Bitcoin Cash? :)

But seriously, it does have the lowest fees of the four supported by coinbase, and always should (since that’s its whole raisin d’etre!).

Cool idea, well done!

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

#63

Post by Samin100 »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #62
Samin100 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why no Bitcoin Cash? :) But seriously, it does have the lowest fees of the four supported by coinbase, and always should (since that’s its whole raisin d’etre!). Cool idea, well done!

Honestly I wish I had a good answer to this. I didn't think about supporting BCash because I had never seen it used before.

If enough people are interested in it, I can add support since it's already supported by Coinbase/GDAX.

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

#64

Post by highd »

sangnoir wrote: post #42
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…

> 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…

Golem is solving exactly this problem.

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

#65

Post by boulos »

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/primer) as it’s nicely formatted and has pretty icons. I think you should update the comparisons to the cloud providers though. Comparing a Pascal-series (1080 Ti) part to a Kepler part (K80) isn’t particularly fair, as NVIDIA charges about the same for that part as the later P100s and V100s. That is, people should be comparing what the best price/performance ratio is, and all three providers have better options. There’s a secondary question about whether the right comparison is to AWS Spot / Preemptible VMs / Low Priority VMs, but I’m not sure from a quick skim what the likely preemption rate will be with your setup.

Finally, let me echo dgacmu in saying it’s too bad that NVIDIA forces all providers to only provide the expensive parts. The best price/performance is certainly the consumer parts (that 1080 Ti compares favorably to a P100 at a fraction of the cost), but both the EULA and otherwise prevent it. You’re not running a direct service / providing things in a data center which is a cool workaround! But you should definitely be more clear about the risks of letting untrusted third-party code to execute against your GPU.

Again, great project!

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

#66

Post by baddox »

sangnoir wrote: post #42
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…

> 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…

I’m under the impression that proof of work that verifies the authenticity of transactions on a blockchain cannot must depend on those specific transactions as its input. If there are other uses for the work that are unrelated to securing specific transactions, then the fact that you performed the work says nothing about the authenticity of those transactions.

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

#67

Post by tudorconstantin »

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, 4gb RAM,and a 5400 RPM HDD. Oh, and to be able to see all the GPUs, I had to downgrade all the PCIEx slots to 1x.

I am curious what kind of ML tasks would be able to fully utilize these GPUs, on such a low end hardware.

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

#68

Post by brador »

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…

You could randomize the tests + test everyone at the same time. So every r(n) cycles send a micro problem with a known precomputed locally verified solution. Compare solutions, kick and ban node if wrong.

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

#69

Post by carussell »

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…

> 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?

See https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/nodevms-alpha

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

#70

Post by pishpash »

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…

That's an interesting arbitrage to make cloud computing costs drop towards mining costs, i.e. cost of electricity.
Post reply on HN