
Startup turns 19k under-utilised gaming cafes into ML servers during COVID-19 - penguinten
https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-deal-lease-the-unused-processing-power-of-shuttered-gaming-cafes/
======
Nextgrid
I didn't know "gaming cafes" were still a thing. I also wonder what the
bandwidth is like. Processing power is straightforward to acquire (buy GPUs)
but decent bandwidth can be very hard to acquire in certain areas and yet is
necessary if you want to rent out those machines as clients need to bring the
data to them fast (labelled assets for ML training, etc).

------
mrmrcoleman
This is very impressive. I've been following the progress of akash.network:
[https://akash.network/](https://akash.network/)

They wrote two white papers which gave me a much better understanding of the
challenges involved in creating a "market for compute" although I'll admit
that much of the maths went over my head.

Mining economics: [https://akash-web-
prod.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/03/akas...](https://akash-web-
prod.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/03/akash-econ.pdf)

Decentralised cloud infrastructure marketplace: [https://akash-web-
prod.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/03/akas...](https://akash-web-
prod.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/03/akash-position.pdf)

~~~
lifty
Akash looks cool! I am working on a self hosting solution
([https://protos.io](https://protos.io)) that is similar to Sandstorm, and
I've been dreaming of a way to deploy VMs on various cloud providers, without
requiring an account creation beforehand and without having any
intermediaries. Akash looks like it could become that. Unfortunately at the
moment you can only deploy containers, and I need the ability to deploy full
VMs.

------
jecox108
Heya! I’m Jamie, I’m actually one of the co-founders of FluidStack, the
company in the post. We’ve been working with gaming cafes to help them earn
money during the lockdown across the US, and offering them out to customers as
ultra-cheap servers for machine learning, video rendering, and cloud gaming.
We would love feedback from HN on this -- if anybody has thoughts -- I’d love
to hear them! You can also reach me at jamie@fluidstack.io if you’d rather
email me anything. Thanks!

