

Ask HN: Do you have a lot of idle hardware? - Patrick_Devine

Hey guys,<p>I&#x27;m trying to figure out if a lot of people have extra machines, either server grade stuff, or even desktop gaming rigs, lying around not being used.  We&#x27;ve figured a way of building a cloud out of machines which can be parked anywhere, and I&#x27;m wondering if there actually is a reasonable amount of supply out there.<p>I know when I was working for a large Fortune 100 firm we often had piles of machines sitting in our datacenter not doing anything, but I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s common or not.
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akassover
Can you be a little more specific about the scope of who "you" is? Startups,
small businesses, freelancers, etc. I can answer this question, but I'm not
sure I'd be polluting your data or not.

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Patrick_Devine
I'm actually curious about anyone/everyone. My supposition is that there is a
lot of dormant compute out there, and all of it is useful, although for
different purposes. The biggest problem is that it's all locked up with no way
of connecting it to a useful workload. It just seems like a colossal waste.

My guess is there is a lot of people with desktop/gaming machines which are
powered off 20+ hours of the day. For startups/freelancers, I know I've got
three or four machines which are powered off not doing anything other than
depreciating.

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akassover
My company maintains no hardware (everything is "in the cloud"). No server
grade stuff or gaming rigs here - I did a purge of some desktop PCs over the
summer.

The closest thing I have is an xbox 360 in a closet. I've got a 4 year old
macbook pro in a drawer that I keep as a cold spare, a 3 year old macbook air
that gets used about 4 hours a month, and a 2 month old macbook pro that is my
bread-and-butter machine.

However, I do know people with basements full of hardware.

