A company I work for have a significant number of Linux servers on premises that remain idle during nights and weekends. These servers are completely free (mostly proxmox) and not utilized during these periods. I am seeking suggestions and ideas on how this can be monetize or we can leverage this untapped resource effectively.
I believe that there must be creative ways to make use of these idle servers and generate some form of revenue or value from them.
I recall many years ago CPUs could be given out for the genome project....
Well, I image it would not be that hard to just have gitlab-ci/github-ci VM given out... but how?
The problem is that the marginal price of compute is minimal and the overheads of distributing work across various untrusted machines (plus moving any data to them) outweigh the potential savings, so that's why there's no standardized market for this. If you had enough servers and development capacity in your business I guess you could start a hosting/cloud provider side business to sell that extra capacity?
There might be a market if those servers have GPUs, but even then I'm not sure if the earnings would be worth it and would trump what you could earn yourself by just mining crypto on them.
Short of those options, just power them off on a schedule and use IPMI/etc to start them back up when needed.