Such a technology would enable neat stuff, like renting a server for someone to run a single program for some period of time and have the results sent back. Nobody does this for unrestricted programs today, for many reasons, a very important one being the fact that it would be very hard to do this in a secure way.
Well, almost nobody. NearlyFreeSpeech[1] lets you compile and run unrestricted C and C++ programs on their servers, or any other binary, if you compile it somewhere else. I've done some tests with a Go based webservice.
They do have a very restricted time limit until they're killed, but that's because their servers are designed for web applications, not data crunching.
Thanks for the info. Seriously I should have said "almost nobody" in the first place. In fact I thought I had said that :)
I didn't know nfshost was doing it. From what I see, they're probably using FreeBSD jails in this case, which is nice if they are.
Anyways, we have to agree that this space is largely unexplored. I never thought there was a need for this kind of service, but just after reading the ZeroVM pages I think it's a very good idea. With a "little" more initial effort, it would enable writing systems in a very interesting way: self-healing (when the other end has failed, make an API call to provision another copy of it), self-provisioning (when traffic is high, make an API call to provision another copy of a worker), etc. Of course we can already do this already, it would just be more natural, and if you combine this with the idea of Mobile Agents, then the cloud suddenly becomes much "cloudier".
Well, almost nobody. NearlyFreeSpeech[1] lets you compile and run unrestricted C and C++ programs on their servers, or any other binary, if you compile it somewhere else. I've done some tests with a Go based webservice.
They do have a very restricted time limit until they're killed, but that's because their servers are designed for web applications, not data crunching.
[1]: http://example.nfshost.com/versions.php