
A new spot market makes cloud computing a commodity - yungchin
http://www.economist.com/node/18185752?story_id=18185752
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ianso
I think that compute power moving towards commodity status would be a great
thing, however, I also think there's one big problem that needs to be
surmounted at present: bandwidth isn't free.

Practically speaking, to be properly fungible, it should be possible to move
compute workloads across the 'Net into whatever environment happens to be
cheapest. But for anything being done with large amounts of data, there's a
non-negligible cost to moving that data across the Internet, and this in turn
can lead to things like lock-in. In fact one could argue that it's almost the
only form of lock-in practiced by AWS.

On the other hand, if compute power DOES become a commodity, that would be
great, because then Jevons paradox would probably kick in, which could itself
lead to true ubicomp etc. One can dream :-)

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rlpb
Instead of buying an electric heater, I'd like to buy a server that
automatically sells its power on a market like this to subsidise my
electricity bill.

If all electric heaters in the world provided CPU power for us as well, where
would we be?

~~~
wmf
The CPU time on a server located in a data center is worth money, but CPU time
on a server in your house is worthless due to bandwidth and other issues.

~~~
wladimir
That's not true. It depends on the kind of workload, which can be CPU-bound,
IO-bound, network-bound, etc...

If a workload is truly distributed, simply fetches data blocks to process then
goes computing for a while (Example: folding@home), the amount of bandwidth
doesn't matter.

Also, some people have substantial amounts of bandwidth to their house :)

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mynameishere
_offered capacity on 4,000 servers that would otherwise sit unused (probably
in a lull between making animated movies)_

Not much detail on this. The computers are "probably" doing something part of
the time? Really? So when the animation crew goes to use their machines they
have to disable them from the commodity network first? What happens if
scientists are in the middle of using them? Are the hard drives sometimes
unexpectedly full of porno and pirated Mp3s? Is the phone company going to
notice the 10000x increase in the data coming in and out of these machines?
Are any companies storing personal data on these XYZ random machines?

This is a cuter equivilent though:

<http://www.pluraprocessing.com/>

It steals cpu cycles from people playing online games.

~~~
natep
It's probably running as a low-priority process, so that if any normal process
needs CPU time, it get it. I'm currently running Enigma@home and Milkyway@home
on my computer, so all of my cores are always at 100%, except when my other
programs start to use more than 25%, and then the @home's instantly suspend
processing. The only time my system seems to slow down is when starting
virtual machines.

I imagine this software is similar, which is why it's not meant for people
that need reliable access. If somebody starts rendering in the middle of a
SpotCloud job, then the SpotCloud job doesn't continue until the rendering is
done. And if the rendering doesn't finish until after the job expires, then
the job is restarted on a different computer. The worst thing you could do
(from SpotCloud's perspective) would be to have your computer available for
99% of the time it takes to do the job, and then become unavailable until
after the deadline, but I imagine that doesn't happen very much.

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neilc
Interesting. I heard the other day that Enron implemented a somewhat similar
concept in 1999: a market for bandwidth.

<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/11/48732>

~~~
yungchin
That's an interesting parallel. Are you shouting "bubble!" then?

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tybris
> _The service is technically surprising. Enomaly did not build a big central
> infrastructure, because the bandwidth demands “would have killed us”, says
> Reuven Cohen, the firm’s founder. Instead, it works with Google App Engine,
> another cloud-computing provider, which gives Enomaly access to a
> decentralised global system._

This doesn't make much sense to me. Google App Engine is not very "global" and
its bandwidth prices are pretty standard unless you're small enough to fit in
the free tiers.

