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Has anyone signed up with Popular Power and if so, has anyone gotten paid by it? How do they pay you? That's not in the FAQ.

Maybe it can battle SETI@HOME, Kazaa, and Norton Antivirus for all of my CPU cycles, disk bandwidth and network bandwidth. It will not even leave me enough power to compose all my correspondence in notepad.

Don't just give those cycles away! Sell them!

Great idea but alas, Distributed Science Inc. (a/k/a The ProcessTree Network)'s old domain name is for sale and Popular Power is a dead business, suggesting a lack of profit potential in this business model as yet.

You mean like Popular Power tried (and failed)to do? Check their old site to see what they used to propose.

Looks like selling CPU cycles is not a lucrative business...

You mean like Popular Power tried (and failed)to do? Check their old site to see what they used to propose.

Looks like selling CPU cycles is not a lucrative business...

Popular Power had a java-based client. It basically ran off a JDK it helped install on your system, not via the browser. (They ran out of money, dunno what happened to the code.) It would run when your screen saver turned on, which I think makes more sense than asking a user to visit a website.

You're missing the real problem with all these distributed approaches. There aren't many corporate commercial computing jobs that are limited by compute speed. High-end server applications are usually most limited by disk I/O rates, which none of these ISOS approaches effectively address.

ISOS is great for compute-bound problems, OK for network-bound problems, and lousy for diskIO-bound problems, while the application portfolio willing to pay for speedup is overwhelmingly the reverse, except for a few scattered niches.

RPM speeds on disk drives don't improve at Moore's Law rates. The CPU isn't the bottleneck, the database is the bottleneck.

--LP

P.S. Also, writing parallel-efficient applications remains mostly "hard."

come off crisp and play up to the cynic
clean and schooled right down to the minute

come off crisp and play up to the cynic
clean and schooled right down to the minute

The Peer-to-Peer compute-cycle companies have already started folding. (And I don't mean proteins.) The number of commercial businesses that could rake in more dough if they just had more compute cycles (aka a Beowulf cluster or these more loosely coupled P2P variants) is not too many.

For example, Popular Power seems to have closed their company and website sometime in the last few weeks. A shame too, as their UI allowed you to easily choose what percentage of your CPU cycles were for-profit and what were for non-profit projects.

check popular power http://www.popularpower.com to help solve problems here on earth!

You ask whether there is any reason Java would not work for this purpose; the only reason I know of is that some industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals) have not adopted Java for their large-scale computation. In these cases, we provide the company an enterprise server product that lets them run code written in any language on their own machines behind their firewall. You lose the protection of the Java sandbox, but since the same company is both writing and running the code, this is a good trade-off.

Best,
Marc Hedlund <marc@popularpower.com>
CEO, Popular Power <http://www.popularpower.com/>

Give your computer something to dream about (tm)
www.popularpower.com

You ask whether there is any reason Java would not work for this purpose; the only reason I know of is that some industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals) have not adopted Java for their large-scale computation. In these cases, we provide the company an enterprise server product that lets them run code written in any language on their own machines behind their firewall. You lose the protection of the Java sandbox, but since the same company is both writing and running the code, this is a good trade-off.

Best,
Marc Hedlund <marc@popularpower.com>
CEO, Popular Power <http://www.popularpower.com/>

Give your computer something to dream about (tm)
www.popularpower.com

You ask whether there is any reason Java would not work for this purpose; the only reason I know of is that some industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals) have not adopted Java for their large-scale computation. In these cases, we provide the company an enterprise server product that lets them run code written in any language on their own machines behind their firewall. You lose the protection of the Java sandbox, but since the same company is both writing and running the code, this is a good trade-off.

Best,
Marc Hedlund <marc@popularpower.com>
CEO, Popular Power <http://www.popularpower.com/>

Give your computer something to dream about (tm)
www.popularpower.com

You ask whether there is any reason Java would not work for this purpose; the only reason I know of is that some industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals) have not adopted Java for their large-scale computation. In these cases, we provide the company an enterprise server product that lets them run code written in any language on their own machines behind their firewall. You lose the protection of the Java sandbox, but since the same company is both writing and running the code, this is a good trade-off.

Best,
Marc Hedlund <marc@popularpower.com>
CEO, Popular Power <http://www.popularpower.com/>

Give your computer something to dream about (tm)
www.popularpower.com

Try Popular Power. Great Flash screensavers, plus they will be paying soon. In the meantime, help create an influenze vaccine.

This article didn't mention Popular Power. Popular Power has the BEST screensaver, plus it WILL pay it's clients as soon as it gets a commercial project. Sign up now to help work on an influenza vaccine

I'm a big fan of Popular Power. It lets you choose between using your machines for profit-projects (you actually get paid once they start up), and non-profit projects. Right now, their current project is creating influenza vaccines. Nice Flash screen savers, to boot.

I'd love to, but running their client inside of SoftWindows wouldn't be very efficient.

I agree that Seti isn't likely to succeed, but cracking ever-larger math puzzles has diminishing returns for me. I'd rather devote my cycles to something likely to help humankind.

Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power, but their client runs in Java, so it's possibly even less efficient than a Windows emulator. Ugh. It uses less memory at least. Anyone else know a worthy cause that runs natively on MacOS?

> Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially.

there are number of companies that are going to offer for pay project. you should check out following sites:

popular power: Research on influenza vaccination. has windows and gnu/linux clients. mac, solaris and *bsd clients about to be released soon. it has tim oreilly of o'reilly as board member.

parabon: Research on cancer treatment (chemotherapy). clients exist only for windows but they are going to release gnu/linux client soon. they are giving out 100$ on daily basis to random providers.

Dcypher/Processtree they have some kind of physics project. problem is that its easily to cheat on this project. they are also giving out 100$ to random users.


now to my conclusion. all of these projects are paying to little to warrant me donating my cpu time to them. many of them demands that you have 24/7 access to inet. this is something that is unnacaptable to large number of users in europe because we dont have flat rate, so i'll keep donating my cpu cycles to ogr project on dist.net

I took a look at the current projects running from distributed.net, and couldn't find anything that appeared even marginally useful or interesting. Running brute-force hacks on encryption algorithms isn't much different than running a random number generator until your target value happens to appear. Both are equally useless.

At least SETI has a clear goal, and is a useful (and entertaining) pursuit which is naturally parallelizable. Other systems (PopularPower, etc.) also have useful things you can do with 'spare' cycles (at least if you're not the one paying the electric bill).

I fail to understand why anyone is advocating spending cycles on hunting for random numbers, a la distributed.net . Care to enlighten me?

Golem@Home is my favorite. Use spare cycles to design/evolve new robotic 'lifeforms'.

Entropia has several science and medical oriented research projects underway.

Popular Power is working on new influenza vaccines.

Folderol is doing Human Genome stuff.

There are dozens of others out there, but if nothing turns you on, the folks at the Cosm Project have an open source platform for building your own distributed computing project.

Popular Power has committed to open-sourcing our client. (Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly & Associates is an investor and is on our board of directors; Brian Behlendorf from Collab.net and the Apache Software Foundation is also an investor.)

Best,
Marc Hedlund <marc@popularpower.com>
CEO, Popular Power

Give your computer something to dream about.
www.popularpower.com

Popular Power has committed to open-sourcing our client. (Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly & Associates is an investor and is on our board of directors; Brian Behlendorf from Collab.net and the Apache Software Foundation is also an investor.)

Best,
Marc Hedlund <marc@popularpower.com>
CEO, Popular Power

Give your computer something to dream about.
www.popularpower.com

I'm the CTO of Popular Power. Good discussion here, thanks! I really think this technology is neat; we can turn the Internet into a very powerful resource and then use that resource to solve important problems. Our current influenza work is contributing to research that could save millions of lives.

One poster here wondered how good this kind of distributed computer would be at biotech apps. Depends a lot on the algorithm, but for things that trivially parallelize (like random search algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations) it's a perfect match.

Popular Power has been up and running since April. We've had a Linux client out for a couple of months now; download it and try it out!

I'm the CTO of Popular Power. Good discussion here, thanks! I really think this technology is neat; we can turn the Internet into a very powerful resource and then use that resource to solve important problems. Our current influenza work is contributing to research that could save millions of lives.

One poster here wondered how good this kind of distributed computer would be at biotech apps. Depends a lot on the algorithm, but for things that trivially parallelize (like random search algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations) it's a perfect match.

Popular Power has been up and running since April. We've had a Linux client out for a couple of months now; download it and try it out!

If you want a mix of volunteer and commercial projects, try PopularPower</ a>. Their current project is optimizing flu vaccines, pretty cool imho.

--LP

try Popular Power -- we at least have working software.... (for linux too :)

My company, Popular Power, has had commercial distributed computing software out since April. We just put out a Linux version in response to a Freshmeat Petition, check it out!

Our system is pretty neat; we're doing real work (researching flu vaccines), and our client is truly general purpose in that we can switch the kinds of work we're doing on the fly with no re-install. We're lining up customers now; we'll switch over to paying work as time goes on. We're also planning an open source release of the client software.

I truly think this kind of computing, along with other distributed systems like Gnutella, is the future of the Internet. For a good overview of this field, check out Howard Rheingold's article in the new August Wired, or this Wired news article.

My company, Popular Power, has had commercial distributed computing software out since April. We just put out a Linux version in response to a Freshmeat Petition, check it out!

Our system is pretty neat; we're doing real work (researching flu vaccines), and our client is truly general purpose in that we can switch the kinds of work we're doing on the fly with no re-install. We're lining up customers now; we'll switch over to paying work as time goes on. We're also planning an open source release of the client software.

I truly think this kind of computing, along with other distributed systems like Gnutella, is the future of the Internet. For a good overview of this field, check out Howard Rheingold's article in the new August Wired, or this Wired news article.