Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
ben.akrin.com
Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#2opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow their browser to contribute compute ... eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop ... win win
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#3opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow their browser to contribute compute ... eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop ... win win
Keep dreaming.
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#4opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow their browser to contribute compute ... eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop ... win win
Keep dreaming.
Why should we keep dreaming?
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#5Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep dreaming.
Why should we keep dreaming?
AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time if you don’t particularly care about having uniform availability of it in the form of spot instances.
The economics of people letting you use their browser doesn’t make sense. The pay is crap and the time when they are browsing is exactly when they would not want their computer doing a bunch of background processing. You’re better off letting people rent out their CPU time through a dedicated application when they are not using it. And remember electricity is not free.
Even then, it’d be tough to compete with AWS on pricing considering its spot instances do exactly this, even letting you bid for what you want to pay.
I should have explained this in my original post, but I figured it was obvious.
To suggest a solution: don’t offer payments at all but maybe instead gameify CPU time donation somehow. Maybe then you’ll have a better chance, but potentially less participation, unless people are donating to charitable causes. Either way it’s not going to do anything to affect AWS or Google Compute prices. Creating an entire startup just for the goal of getting some reduced prices on the actual compute platforms you want to use is madness. Just pay the money.
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#7For those having trouble viewing the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20180303173013/http://ben.akrin....
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#8opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow their browser to contribute compute ... eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop ... win win
Seems like getting a Linux kernel and a LAMP stack running on this would be a good first step. The technical challenge of doing it sounds fun and interesting. The real payoff may be when a billing and payment system is able to consolidate billing from processing clients and to distribute the payments to the owners of the processing clients based on the work performed
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#9opportunity here to create cloud computation platforms where people submit work which gets executed on other people's machines who are getting paid to allow their browser to contribute compute ... eventually price of AWS / google compute engine will drop ... win win
The big problem I see to be solved with p2p computation is trust. In the example, the problem to be solved is "Do any of these strings hash to a known value?" An adversary can accept the job, sleep for a second, and report "Nope" and collect their payment, without ever doing any work.
In contrast, I trust that if I run code on AWS, it'll actually run the code I give it.
These are solvable problems, but important to think about.
Re: Turning web traffic into a Super Computer
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we keep dreaming?
AWS at least already has very cheap ways to get compute time if you don’t particularly care about having uniform availability of it in the form of spot instances. The economics of people letting you use their browser doesn’t make sense. The pay is crap and the time when they are browsing is exactly when they would not want their computer doing a bunch of background processing. You’re better off letting people rent ou…
Seti@home has been doing this for years