
Show HN: Junk Systems – share your linux shell for BTC, compute on the cheap - grandrew
https://junk.systems/
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grandrew
Hi! My name is Andrew and I want to introduce you a piece of junk I scratched
in a couple of weeks - a CPU-ridesharing service Junk.Systems

I’ve had a few projects lately that require extremely cheap computation
without any need for reliability or security - I needed just raw computation,
and my demand is pretty constant.

So I calculated that I can build computing farm from used hardware and operate
it profitably for the price 10 times lower than google’s preemptible machine
for my projects. But building a computer farm yourself is not in trend
nowadays, right? So I thought of uberizing the CPU sharing by just providing a
non-privileged login to linux machines with no guarantee. If the machine gets
screwed up for any reason - no prob, just reboot/reinstall/whatever. According
to my calculations with current price a $10k farm will earn about $1000 in
bitcoins a month so that may even be a kind of business. If the whole idea
works, or course. At least, if somebody will use the computations - you can
get a “free” heating source from your junk :)

I’m thinking of making the whole thing work entirely on smart contracts for
the best transparency and survivability of the project - as I believe that
cheap computation is the key to prosperity of the Humanity.

Please let me know what you think about this stuff and I am open for ideas and
any type of collaboration, Thanks!

~~~
cjsaylor
This is a cool idea. The price as listed is "cheap", but for the feature set,
it's not really that cheap. It's half the cost of a digitalocean droplet with
no security and possible surge pricing.

I think it's a fantastic idea and the implementation here seems easy to use,
but needs to be significantly cheaper.

~~~
grandrew
cjsaylor, thank you for your feedback! Yes the price is not so low I just had
to have some figures to start with.

But as you may know - the $5 machine you are referencing here is not suitable
for any meaningful work as you will have about 300MB of RAM after you boot it
for your use - and this is about the amount or RAM you will need just for your
framework to load up. So you should basically compare it with the $10 or $20
machine. Also you should take into account that the price here is the actual
CPU-time - while DigitalOcean charges you the wall-hour - so I estimate the
price like 5x-10x lower depending on your task.

But yes I know where to move from here - for example switching to accounting
in GigaFLOPS-hour rather than machine time to allow usage of power efficient
laptops for example (old laptops are usually slower but are still very energy
efficient) and also for the owners of faster hardware to benefit

The absence of any authentication on both sides is arguably a disadvantage
though. You may choose to compute anonymously for privacy related reasons and
Junk.Systems is the only platform that allows you to do so AFAIK.

~~~
cjsaylor
Fair points. I guess it wasn't super clear from the pricing example. I think,
as you say, expressing the price per CPU time rather than wall clock time is
what would better sell me on it.

I could actually see a pretty good use case for academic computing (think SETI
at home, or the genome project) to where they could get cheaper access to CPU.

