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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

#81

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…

Consensus for every computation would be 2x as expensive, but you may be able to achieve something like it with randomly assigning 10% of the calculations to be double-checked, and double=checking more (all?) of a node's computations if it has an inconsistent result.

BOINC has quite a sophisticated system, but it's a long time since I looked at the details. I believe new participants are subject to greater scrutiny.

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

#82
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.

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

#83
post #64

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…

Golem is solving exactly this problem.

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.

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

#84
post #40

Creator of Vectordash here! If you have any questions about the platform, feel free to ask away! P.S. I'm @samin100 on Twitter if you enjoy tweets about GPUs!

I saw people on the Reddit thread saying the Ubuntu requirement was a showstopper for a lot of them. You might look into the Win 10 linux support, Ubuntu is one o the supported distros. Not sure if it would have full access to resources, have just used it a bit at work and setup was super simple.

Kind-of +1 about this, I don't really want to run dedicated Ubuntu for something like this but I have no problem running virtualized Ubuntu with GPU via VTd passthru. Recently we've built such host - server board with 2 GPUs that now runs two powerful virtualized desktops. Host uses NixOS and libvirt.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI research demand is a lot easier for AMD/Nvidia to project, which allows them to ramp up production and keep prices stable. Side note: AI research is more beneficial to society than running a few instances of Crysis 9 at 4K 120HZ.

... potentially more beneficial. Also potentially very harmful depending on what it gets used for.

Let's just say that AI research can be useful, and thus this use of GPU time and electricity can be useful; in contrast to the alternative alternative-GPU-use, which is not useful in the first place.

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

#86
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…

While I think it's a valid point I don't see this as a large issue for this platform: I think that many ML workloads do not require a fully-trusted environment as it's easy to verify the results after training by running the test set evaluation on a local machine. Also, many datasets can be transformed in a way such that they do not reveal much about the underlying data itself (e.g. by using one-hot encoding, removing feature labels, categorizing/tokenizing potentially sensitive fields like names, ...), alleviating data security concerns in many cases. Leakage/theft of your ML models/code might be a bigger concern here, though for many companies this might not be a large problem either as in my experience the models are often just slight modifications of "best practice" architectures.

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

#87
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.

You should elaborate when you say stuff like this otherwise some people will assume you are just advertising.

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

#88
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 think this is a great business idea with a lot of potential, if you can address the reliability, scalability and trust problems you might have a really large business opportunity here. I'm really impressed with your pragmatic and simple (for the user) implementation of this idea, I think you really did a great job identifying a minimal set of useful features and implementing that to validate your idea, congratulations! How long did you work on this so far if I might ask?

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

#89
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…

While I think it's a valid point I don't see this as a large issue for this platform: I think that many ML workloads do not require a fully-trusted environment as it's easy to verify the results after training by running the test set evaluation on a local machine. Also, many datasets can be transformed in a way such that they do not reveal much about the underlying data itself (e.g. by using one-hot encoding, removin…

Piling on/agreeing with you: The “magic smoke” isn’t the model, it’s the infrastructure the model plugs into, the data->feature pipeline, AND the model. Assuming you’be done the things you mention (and maybe with one additional assumption of several models operating at once), I would also consider the models themselves to USUALLY not be super super sensitive.

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

#90
post #83
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golem is solving exactly this problem.

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.
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