
Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing - adamsmith
https://gridspot.com/compute/
======
uvdiv
_"Thus, we decided to only run computations when the outdoor temperature near
the user is below a certain level (currently 16 degrees Celcius). When it's
that cold outside, we assume that the computer's room is being heated anyway.
All of the electricity used to do computations gets turned into heat,
according to the laws of physics. So the heat generated by the computations
displaces the need for heat generated by a heater, eliminating or minimizing
the net elecricity usage."_

<https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe>

Doesn't work in the USA. Natural gas heating in the US averages
$10.80/thousand cubic feet ~= $10/gigajoule [1]. Electricity averages
$0.1179/kWh ~= $33/gigajoule [1] -- more than three as expensive for raw heat.
Natural gas heating is twice as common in US homes, with about 55.6 million
vs. 28.4 million using electric resistance heating [2] -- not including 9.8
million electric heat pumps.

In the common case, you're displacing cheap gas heating with expensive
electric resistance heating; the cost "savings" on heating is small. At 100W
power consumption, you're spending 1.2 cents/hour on electricity, saving 0.4
cents/hour on gas, for a net loss of 0.8 cents/hour. Meanwhile your CPU is
being sold for 0.1 - 0.3 cents/hour [3] -- far less than the electricity
needed to run it, apparently (?).

[1] <http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/prices.cfm> (residential retail
prices, 2011)

[2] (.xls)
[http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/xls/HC6...](http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/xls/HC6.1%20Space%20Heating%20by%20Housing%20Unit%20Type.xls)

[3] <https://gridspot.com/compute/>

European costs for comparison:

[4] <http://www.energy.eu/>

~~~
humbert
Break-even is 0.2 cents/hour per core for a 4-core system that uses 100 watts.
A full i7-3770K system with integrated graphics uses 102 watts under heavy
load [1], and when each of its 4 cores sells for 0.2 cents/hour, that covers
the 4*0.2 = 0.8 cents/hour difference from natural gas to electricity. 0.3
cents/hour covers the entire electricity usage, providing free heat.

[1] [http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i73770K-Ivy-
Bridge...](http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i73770K-Ivy-Bridge-
Processor-Review/?page=13)

~~~
uvdiv
Okay, if it's per core-hour that's different.

------
soupboy
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>

~~~
adamsmith
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 people want this type of compute.

~~~
hhjj
Your "giving back" paragraph about what motivates your users is completely
dishonest. You know your users are clueless and installed your client because
it was bundled with an application they actually wanted to use.

~~~
gizzlon
Care to elaborate? What programs bundle this?

------
panarky
This seems too good to be true, but it's working great for me!

With no credit card, I got an instance with 3 GB RAM running in less than 60
seconds. It costs $0.002 per hour.

One glitch: Both the UI and the API say there are 2 instances running, but
they both have the same IP address and port. If there really are 2 instances,
how do I ssh to the second one?

~~~
adamsmith
That sounds like a bug! Just sent you email : )

~~~
jontas
I've got another one for you :)

The Add Credit Card link is pointing here:

<http://localhost:8000/compute/change_card>

~~~
adamsmith
How embarrassing (but fixed now). That was introduced when I added the ability
to boot five instances without a credit card. Thanks for letting me know!

------
justinsb
This is great - it looks to have some very sensible answers to many of the
questions of how a distributed cloud would work.

The thing that excites me most about a distributed cloud is that it could turn
the notion of elastic computing on its head. You can buy your peak compute
requirement, and sell back the surplus. So you can get elastic computing not
by re-engineering your own systems, but by selling excess capacity to those
whose workloads are a good match.

------
MichaelApproved
Here's how you sustain this model: package the VM with free software just like
the toolbar guys do. You pay the software guys a cut of the profit for every
setup they have running (referral fee) and users get a new way to "pay" for
software. I like this idea much better than all the spyware/crapware software
vendors have to package into their product to earn a living.

Consumers don't care about $2/month but a business would care about getting
paid $2/month thousands of times.

Edit: If a VM is too big to download all at once with a freeware product, you
just install the seed software. Then, over the next few days, the seed
software downloads the VM and slowly sets it up so there's no disruption to
the customer's activity on the computer.

I would also suggest you reserve the space needed on the disk with an empty
file, roughly the size of the VM file. This way it's clear just how much space
this newly installed software is taking on the customer's computer.

This is all based on the idea that the customer agreed to this during the
installation. To what extent "agreed" is left up to you to decide. I'd suggest
a dedicated page during the installation with a prechecked box that explains
what this is and what it's about to do.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I disagree. I don't think many companies that have 1000 computers would do
this for $2/mo per node. That's like $22,000, also known as a rounding error
for those kinds of companies. Besides, those companies tend to frown on these
suspect applications.

~~~
MichaelApproved
No, I don't mean for companies to run it on their own servers, I mean for them
to bundle the software with freeware software. The kind you find on
download.com.

Often, freeware software developers bundle toolbars and other spyware/crapware
with their software to make money. My suggestion would be to allow them to
include the VM with their software instead of spyware/crapware toolbars. These
freeware authors would earn a commission for every VM install that makes
money.

Freeware developers need to earn money but their main option is to bundle
their code with crapware now. This would be a nice alternative to that awful
option.

------
devmach
From <https://gridspot.com/privacy>

> _We have designed the Gridspot Software..._

Sorry if i missed but : Who are you ? Please put some information about
"yourself" somewhere on your site. And if you can, please answer these
questions on your page :

\- What is your company name and legal type ?

\- What is your location ?

\- How can i contact to you ? No, support@gridspot.com doesn't count, put some
landline numbers too.

\- Who are your team members ?

And please don't use " Whois guard" ?

edit: Looks like, downvoting is easier than answering the questions.
Seriously, can you explain to me : why do you trust some company which doesn't
give any information about itself ?

~~~
uvdiv
I think it's Adam Smith of Xobni, he's the guy (adamsmith) who submitted this
link.

<http://blog.adamsmith.cc/about-adam-smith.html>

~~~
devmach
Thanks. But that's an assumption. He / they should write relevant company
informations on gridspot.com.

~~~
MichaelApproved
No, it's Adam but you're right that he should write something about himself
within the company website. In the meantime, you can see him answering
feedback in the comments of this discussion. Here's one of them
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226286>

------
wmf
So the customer pays Gridspot and Gridspot does not pay anything to the person
whose computer is actually doing the work? Great business model if you can
make it work.

~~~
malkia
reminds me of skype, but the differnce is that with skype I only want one good
connection, so find the best one through the forest... but this one?

~~~
fl3tch
The difference is that most Skype users don't even know they are carrying
traffic for the network. The client silently punches a whole in their router
and makes itself a pain to close (for example by reconfiguring what the red X
does) without ever explaining why it wants to keep running so badly.

~~~
Maakuth
My understanding is that after MSFT acquisition, they don't use their customer
devices as supernodes anymore [1]. For "silent hole punching" with UPnP, that
is very much business as usual for any VoIP application as well as other
applications, such as Windows' Teredo IPv6 thingy.

[1]: Ars Technica seems to confirm:
[http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-
replaces-p2p-s...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-
replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/)

~~~
malkia
Now that was news to me :) Didn't know they've changed it that way. Thanks for
the article!

------
panarky
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>

~~~
slig
How is possible to fight a DDOS attack with lots of IP addresses?

~~~
donavanm
Increase the attack surface area. With anycast the nearest nodes to the
attackers "sink" all of the traffic. The rest of the nodes continue to serve
other customers with no I'll effect.

With this product you will have a very wide base of unicast addresses. Treat
each node/address as disposable. Use fast failing health checks and an out of
band control plane. As each node falls to attack remove it from your service
discovery layer (DNS/http 302/etc). See "fast flux dns" for implementation
ideas. The attacker will spend a disproportionate amount of resources
(packets/s) attacking each of your disposable nodes. The majority of your
"good" customers will continue to be served. In a traditional tiered
architecture the L3->L7 routing layer (LB/Proxy) is very expensive to scale
vertically. Your data store & compute end are clustered behind these choke
points. Remove/minimize shared state and you can have independent units of
compute. Remove those L3->L7 choke points and you can get a wider & flatter
L1->L3 network fabric. Besides increased durability you get more aggregate
bandwidth per $.

------
qeorge
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 to resell. I'll be interested to see how/if they respond to
this challenge, or if there's something I'm not seeing that makes this point
moot.

~~~
staunch
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.

~~~
EmmaKay
Already being done: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jjqHXsVF-0>

------
donavanm
Facilities management is the worst part of "cloud" services. Getting this
outsourced for low/no cost is brilliant. Check out the OnAPP CDN
implementation.

Please provide a standardish xen/kvm/vmware/vagrent client image. Being win32
exe only is probably costing you a lot of resource provides (like me). Clients
running xen/kvm/vmware are also more likely to be providing higher value
resources, like a colo'd host.

Move your API to a different (sub)domain ASAP. At some point you'll need to
change your DNS architecture. Having your API tied to your zone apex is going
to cause no end of grief. If it's in a (sub)domain you can easily delegate
control to another authoritative name server. You might want to use a
directional DNS product, CNAME to another resource, add another product api,
add another API endpoint, etc.

Provide some sort of initialization hook. Every node I launch should be able
to auto configure my stack without a "push" action, ssh or otherwise. I much
prefer when each node can bootstrap and poll my instance/config management
stack. For example EC2 provides this functionality through the UserData param
of RunInstances.

"Sign in" doesn't have an option or link to "Sign up". From the docs I had to
go back to the home page to find the sign up.

Support payment other than credit card. Paypal etc is nice in that I can
create a balance without extending as much trust to an unknown party.

Don't get suckered in to providing 1:1 IPv4 with your proxy model. If the
product's successful you'll quickly discover that even a /16 is
expensive/unpossible. A 1:1 mapping with IPv6 is operationally plausible. As a
bonus you'll get PR for a "shiny" feature.

Stay away domU egressing through the dom0 IPv4 for now. I guarantee you'll
attract bad actors. A chinese gambling/porn site hosted on those domUs is
going get DDOS'd all the little long day. If that takes out the dom0 internet
connectivity you'll have a revenue generating customer who's upset.

Terminate long running domU instances. You can use this to shape customer
expectations about the ephemeral nature of your product. Expose this to the
instance owner the same way as a dom0 going offline. Try something like
max(mean dom0 availability || 12 hours) + weighted random to get each domUs
lifetime.

Provide a way to request & inspect network locality or latency. Three use case
here I think. 1) Launch instances near $foo. Get decreased latency to a
centralized endpoint, like a scheduler. 2) What is the location of $instance.
I can determine the nearest S3 region for faster GET/PUTs. 3) Launch instances
within $n ms of each other. If instances have shared state or messages during
compute phase this can increase throughput

~~~
deno
They'd have to download your custom image, probably hundred of megabytes or
gigabytes, each time upon starting new instance. This makes no sense on WAN.
It’s much better for both contributors (less stuff to download) and clients
(less time wasted waiting) to only download your application stack.

It’s not EC2 alternative, this is a different kind of service.

~~~
donavanm
I think you miss my point. Currently (AFAIK) the provider/dom0 must download
and run a windows executable. Many people have no windows hosts, but do have
existing xen/kvm dom0s running. If grid spot provided their service as a
xen/kvm client image I would be able to host it.

There's no requirement for the host to download the client image multiple
times. I'd imagine you have something like ephemeral domu disk and use kmods
to provide a control plane and network tunnel.

~~~
deno
> Many people have no windows hosts, but do have existing xen/kvm dom0s
> running. If grid spot provided their service as a xen/kvm client image I
> would be able to host it.

They should provide their image instead of the binary. Theirs, rather than
their clients. Got you know!

But I don’t think their audience will have much use for it. Well it’s unlikely
to be a priority, anyway.

> Don't get suckered in to providing 1:1 IPv4 with your proxy model.

BTW, he doesn’t. It’s all proxied through single IP on different ports. E.g.
this is what I got:

    
    
        ssh gridspot_user@69.4.239.76 -p 25502

------
marcamillion
This is brilliant...I am glad someone finally ran with it. I wrote a blog post
about this almost 2 years ago - [http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-
botnet-billion-dolla...](http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-
billion-dollar-startup-idea)

There are many applications for this - including fighting DDOS attacks. There
are still huge technical challenges with that particular application, but as I
understand it...the only way to fight a DDOS is to a) get bigger guns, or b)
lie down and take your raping.

Having something like this, can (in theory) give you bigger guns.

Do you guys pay the people who have idle resources?

~~~
Jach
> including fighting DDOS attacks

Or cheaply launching them. For a mere $100 you get 100,000 machines for an
hour, that's more than enough to cause problems for a sad number of websites
out there. Edit: Or not, given that all traffic goes through a centralized
node.

~~~
marcamillion
Yeh....was about to say that I doubt that given the architecture. The
difference is that there is a for-profit company that controls the nodes, so I
doubt they would allow that. Completely different than a real botnet where the
botnet owner controls everything.

------
larrys
"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 know that was happening? To mention only one possibility.

~~~
justinsb
Based on my understanding, there's a tightly-locked down outbound firewall:
you only get HTTP,HTTPS and SSH ports. So sending mail over SMTP (spamming)
can't happen.

If someone is doing something evil over e.g. HTTP, presumably GridSpot can
also block that and/or ban them from the system.

If you're sending spam over e.g. Gmail via HTTPS, Gmail will shut you down.

The people running the nodes don't need to worry about e.g. someone
downloading illegal content and getting them in trouble, because it is proxied
through GridSpot.

I think it's a clever solution.

------
panarky
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.

~~~
repsilat
This is explicitly part of their pitch to users. From TFA:

> Gridspot is perfect for jobs that:

> • ...

> • Aren't privacy sensitive

------
spullara
Yay, trying <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Power> again.

------
UK-AL
Can't someone create market-exchange type service, where price is set by
supply and demand. People get paid for idle compute time, and other people buy
it.

The price will go As high it needs to, for suppliers to think it's worth
while.

It would interesting to see what the resting price is. I.e what suppliers
think is worth while. It will probably be at max slightly higher than amazon,
because people will do arbitrage with amazon.

------
xSwag
Ironic how the website is down for me.

~~~
jyothepro
yes the website is down for me too

~~~
stephengillie
As a demonstration of their capabilities, I'm underwhelmed.

~~~
beaucoeur
I think it's a demonstration of how popular the post is, not their
capabilities.

------
podperson
My immediate response was "surely this is less than the cost of the
electricity to run the CPUs" but it turns out it's equal to the marginal cost
of heating a room with CPUs relative to conventional heating (natural gas or
electricity) -- which is pretty genius.

In the long run you would expect this would drive up the bidding for idle CPU
time, meaning that having a couple of idle computers in your house would
generate you a small amount of positive revenue, in much the same way that
contributing electricity back to the grid using solar cells could. Of course,
most people have no use for solar cells (which are expensive), whereas a lot
of us have use for local CPU.

~~~
EmmaKay
They're not the first to do this: [http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-
volunteer-grid-them-...](http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-
grid-them-all)

------
fsckin
It'd be really sweet if they offered VMs with a video card as well... for
science.

~~~
purplezky
you mean like 'bitcoin mining science' ;)

------
lost-theory
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.

~~~
TomatoTomato
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.

------
_j_
There's a typo on <https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe>

second to last word of the first section. Electricity.

------
jasonzemos
What happens when the contributor abruptly cuts out?

~~~
deno
Same thing as with Spot Instances on Amazon. Save your work often, reschedule
eagerly.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=play...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=player_embedded)

~~~
jasonzemos
Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online
for all but a few minutes of each year. Transient machines spread over the
internet on home or office PC's /do not/ have the same operational parameter.

At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they
reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational
power from home/office PC's? This seems entirely unclear based on the
reactions of this thread and the mostly ambiguous stuff written on their
website.

If they are sourcing computational power SETI@home style my question remains,
and I encourage it to be upvoted and answered on such a technically competent
site such as this. Marketing hype is cool, but I'm still an engineer when it
comes to making choices.

~~~
deno
> Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online
> for all but a few minutes of each year.

Spot instances can be killed any time if your bid is too low. This will, of
course, happen less often at Amazon, but the principle is the same. You must
also be significantly more proactive about unreliable performance and poor
security. But this may be worth it sometimes.

> At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they
> reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing
> computational power from home/office PC's?

They’re computational power scavengers :) Seems to be desktop PCs for now.
Maybe in the future it would also make sense to also utilise smartphones
plugged into a charger? I hope they will be successful, because unreliable and
cheap computational power is a pretty cool resource, despite all of its
shortcomings.

------
marcamillion
There is a typo on the 'Gridspot Safe' page.

Network proxying While we allow Internet traffic from software doing
_compuations_ on our platform,

Should be 'computations'.

------
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.

~~~
MichaelApproved
I bet web hosts would put in a clause that won't allow you to sublet in this
manner.

------
Xorlev
Why would people contribute? You're basically profiting off donated energy. I
doubt that's a sustainable model.

------
haliax
This reminds me of <http://www.pluraprocessing.com/>

~~~
taylorbuley
One thing I'd like to hear is whether this is opt-in or -out and whether it's
client or server side.

------
rasur
So, the only payment option is via credit-card.. And if you have no credit
card what then? Am I S.O.L?

~~~
superuser2
How do you pay for everything else online? Do you mail Amazon checks or
something?

~~~
rasur
I use pay-pal or debit card, if I actually buy something online. Credit-card
culture isn't so great where I live, and I personally don't have one - hence
the question.

~~~
deno
AFAIK, credit cards are just debit cards using credit instead of balance. You
need to have CVV2 for online processing, that’s it.

------
thegyppo
We're about to launch a service that allows comparison of benchmarks from
cloud providers (UnixBench/IO & BW), would love to run it on your plans to
compare against Amazon etc.

<http://serverbear.com/benchmarks>

~~~
deno
They’re not EC2 alternative. Benchmarking GridSpot makes absolutely no sense.

------
defilade
I can't believe anyone would install their software without having any idea
who this guy is.

------
cycrutchfield
This is incredible and the pricing could be a game-changer for distributed
compute

~~~
deno
The applications are very limited, but it’s nevertheless incredibly awesome
for a particular niche.

------
PeterisP
Maybe they are just renting out a botnet while it's not used for spam?

------
gyom
What kind of tools are on the VM ? Do I get gcc and some python installation,
for example ?

I would imagine that I would have to reinstall my tools whenever a new
instance starts.

~~~
deno
It seems to be vanilla Ubuntu 11.10 server. And yes, you’d use something like
puppet[1].

[1] <http://puppetlabs.com/>

------
omarchowdhury
Your customer service phone number is returning busy.

------
icehero
So this is where the bot nets computing power go?!

------
RaphiePS
Will you be charged for pre-credit card instances after you add a card? Also,
it's very unclear as to how you end a running instance.

~~~
adamsmith
Yes, though I suppose you could just create another account. : )

You can stop a running instance by shutting down the OS. If it's something
people really want we can add an API/UI mechanism to do it.

~~~
RaphiePS
Huh, I did sudo shutdown now and it worked, but the gui says it's still
running. So a button might be nice.

------
zxcvvcxz
Can somebody explain to me how this works? Gridspot doesn't use a server farm
like Amazon? I don't get it.

Looks like a pretty sweet service though.

~~~
damian2000
If I understand it right, the 'cloud' VM you get is running whole or in part
on desktop user's machines out there somewhere in the world (and connected to
the internet) who have donated their machine's spare CPU power to GridSpot.

------
mmsear
Are you guys using EC2 like Engineyard?

Edit: I just checked the ip 107.20.186.94, and it does look like it's hosted
on Amazon.

------
antman
As an incentive for the nodes you could increase the price a bit and give back
CPUtime credits to the nodes.

------
TomatoTomato
What about the node-owner being able to look inside your box and see what you
are doing?

------
dfischer
This would be more cool if the portion of profits went to those who
contributed cycles.

~~~
freshhawk
Wouldn't work. As soon as you move the incentive to the world of financial
norms people start wondering why they are bothering for a couple bucks a year.

They will get more people doing it to be part of a community if they can keep
that community seeming "cool" in some way.

~~~
larrys
Exactly low pay (generally) provides more of a disincentive than no pay. OTOH
if you say "we will donate to charity $x" that might work.

~~~
TomatoTomato
Or at least purchase carbon offsets...

------
kno
They could use few of those cheap instances to run their web site, its so
slow.

------
pavel_lishin
So, how would one contribute to this?

------
stephen272
so this is basically BOINC but also allows for-profit/non-research companies
to tap its resources

~~~
jasonzemos
It doesn't look like that at all.

------
timClicks
Windows only for contributions? That seems weird, given that jobs are running
within a VM.

------
EmmaKay
Sounds familiar...

[http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-
them-...](http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-all)
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888>

------
wedtm
Boom goes the dynamite.

------
ricardobeat
Is this related to last year's node knockout entry for a distributed chess AI?

~~~
dinkumthinkum
As someone that's done some work on parallel chess, I don't see how this could
have anything to do with the subject.

~~~
jasonzemos
I work in the field too. These are exactly my thoughts on the matter, and I'm
sorely disappointed with the comments in this thread hinting as such so far.

