

Ask HN: Is there a paid Distributed Computing service? - matthewhardnack

Is there a service that offers small payments for distributed computing like Folding@home, but for all things computer intensive (rendering, complex caluclations, etc)?<p>Think Amazon's cloud services but in reverse, you get paid for the computing power your computer provides.<p>If not, what negatives are there to be considered for a service like this?<p>The fact it's a big engineering challenge and people would try to fake computing cycles to receive more money have already been considered.<p>I'm asking HN, because I'm interested to see other's thoughts and who all is interested, Thanks.
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wmf
There were a couple of these companies (the most prominent being
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Devices>), but they went out of business
because the market value of idle CPU time was less than the companies'
overhead costs; they couldn't afford to pay anything.

You could think of Bitcoin as paying for your GPU power, though.

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namank
Like
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_fo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing)?

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matthewhardnack
Right, but the idea is to outsource the computing power to clients for a given
amount of money. Users are then paid small amounts of money for returned
computing power from their inactive home PC. This would give more incentive
for users to utilize these services, instead of the mere 527,880 active
computers for BOINC. This would also provide a more affordable solution to
owning/maintaining data centers.

I notice that the BOINC wiki mentions that users are attributed credits.
"BOINC Credit System helps volunteers keep track of how much CPU time they
have donated to various distributed computing projects."
-<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC_Credit_System>

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namank
Right. Its a very interesting technical project but I`m at a loss for who your
customers would be. I suppose the same people that use BOINC...? Because most
companies that would need that level of power already have the infrastructure
(then there is security...)

This is one market that would require some research. Again though, very
attractive technically...you just need to find people willing to pay.

Could you build a reliable, fast enough web server on this? So that your
master receives a request and hands it off to a node in the network which
parses and responds to the client? THAT would work and could actually compete
with Google Apps and AWS without their costs!

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matthewhardnack
Yeah, there's a lot of research required for a project like this, so much so
that I don't think one person could cover all the bases. Another reason I
turned to HN.

Like you mentioned before, most of the bigger companies that need this level
of power already have it. But the real question we need to ask is, do they
want it? Does a cheaper price, less maintenance and greater amounts of power
qualify for a transition to third-party cloud-computing? Or would security and
the ability to fix any in-house issues out-weigh those?

As far as the server configuration, that's not my specific expertise, so that
I'm not sure, but that sounds like a viable solution.

I think I'm going to write up an article on posterous about this, I'm
interested to see how many people I can get interested in a project like this,
in order to determine if I should dedicate any time to it.

I'll go into more details, such as specifications, features, issues and what
the project hopes to solve. I'll post it as a "Show HN" when I get it
finished, I'll also reply to to this comment so you know when it's up.

Also, sorry for the delayed response, in the middle of a flight to HK.

