More On Paid Distributed Computing

Nastard writes: "Theres a story over at C-Net News.com about making money with distributed processing. The article talks about several companies that are planning to launch per-per-idle projects this fall. Apparantly someone has finally caught on that there is money to be made in this. No surprise that one of the companies is headed up by SETI@Home founder David Anderson." I've always been a fan of distributed.net -- (Subliminal Message: Sign up for Team Slashdot!), but I do wonder with these pay schemes if the payment will actually be enough to cover the cost of electricity. Hurm.

[timothy butts in ...] Also, you may want to check this out. A semi-anonymous reader writes: "Distributed.net President David McNett recently did an interview here with the guys over at Geeknik.net. In the interview, he discusses his role with Distributed.net, future projects they are going to work on, and how he views competition between the various distributed computing organizations. Great read."

Comments

Electricity worries

[laborit]

Hemos writes:
but I do wonder with these pay schemes if the payment will actually be enough to cover the cost of electricity. Hurm.

I quote the distributed.net FAQ:

Doesn't running the client waste a lot of electricity?

Many modern computers can enter low power-usage states when they detect they are idle. This mostly involves powering down the monitor, stopping the hard drive, and allowing the CPU to enter a slower idle state that does not produce as much heat. Running the client on a normally idle should not affect its ability to power down the monitor, which is a significant part of the power usage.

However, the hard drives of a power-saving machine may be prevented from spinning down if the client continues to periodically save or load blocks to disk. If you have multiple hard drives in your machine, you may want to consider ensuring that your client buffers and logs are on the hard drive that is most likely to have other activity as well (such as your OS swap file, or OS System directory), allowing the other less frequently accessed drives to spin-down unaffected. You might also want to consider enabling the Client's "nodisk" mode so that it only uses RAM for its operations, but be aware that your work may be lost if your computer crashes or loses power (wasting the power and idle cycles that the client could have used for productive work if it wasn't lost). You might also want to be aware of the fact that spinning up/down your hard drives can actually reduce its lifetime.

Additionally it is true that the Client will also probably prevent your CPU idle from entering its reduced power consumption idle cycle mode (sometimes called "HLT" mode in x86 processors). However, the actual power consumption by the CPU processor alone is actually a minor portion of the total usage by the computer (much less than 20% usually), and entering the lower usage idle mode only reduces that amount slightly. Note that this idle mode is unrelated to the CPU frequency-lowering that is sometimes done automatically by APM services when no user interactivity is detected (the client will not interfere with this reduction). You should also be aware that sometimes computer fans run only when excessive heat is detected (such as from a continuously operating CPU or hard drive). These cooling fans are an additional source of power usage.

Overall, the actual difference in power consumption by computers that are running the client during periods of time when they are normally left on (for unrelated purposes) is very minor....

- Michael Cohn

Nobody's actually PAYING anybody yet.

[Brento]

What the Slashdot story and the underlying CNet article don't mention is that nobody is actually getting paid yet. I got all excited when I read these stories, and I proceeded to visit every company site named in the CNet story. None of them are paying out yet, and none of them even have pay rates figured out. Save your time.

Going further, I did a search on Yahoo, and hit just about every company listed under Distributed Computing. None of them are paying out - they're just taking in money from investors.

The Slashdot story is only partly right - there is indeed money to be made from this idle-cycle scheme, but it isn't going to be made by folks like you and me. It's being made by the companies who are suckering investors into this. Of all the sites I went through, I counted a rough total of over sixty million bucks in funding that the companies had gotten from investors. And not one dime has been paid out yet....

Distributed projects and ethics

[SClitheroe]

Does it worry anybody that most of these kind of projects coming down the pipe will be run by corporations that most likely won't release the source to the client software?

How will we know with confidence that we're not signing up to be a part of Echelon or Carnivore or something similar?

I guess if the cash incentive is good enough, it won't matter for most people...

The real story

[Duncan3]

I do wonder with these pay schemes if the payment will actually be enough to cover the cost of electricity. Hurm

Nope

I've been at this for a while *chuckles*... and I'm working on a longer whitepaper, but I'll give slashdot a quick preview.

The real (hidden) costs:

• Electricity - min 5-10$/month
• Server Bandwidth - SETI uses about $22,000/month of taxpayer funded bandwidth last I asked, more by now.
• User Bandwidth - not everyone has Cable/DSL ya know. Bandwidth isn't that cheap outside the .us.
• Server and User Hardware - also not free, wear and tear, etc.

Why no company would ever touch it:

• Privacy/secret loss - you cannot do distributed computing and not give out your raw data and trade-sercet code. Period.
• Security - you cannot do anything to prevent bogus results and things from inteligent crackers. Period. If there is money involved, peoelpe will try hard to cheat.

So you have huge hidden costs, total loss of any capitalist advantage, and huge headaches for the admins. Keep dreaming folks.

Makes Sense

[icqqm]

Frankly, I've always wondered how sites like Google manage to do their processing. Serving ads is ok, but for certain sites like /. there's a lot of backend processing that I just don't think ads can cover. Using people's computers sounds like a good idea, but for it to make any economical sense it probably would have to be pretty cheap.

Needless to say there are some serious security issues here that no doubt won't be properly assessed.

I heard about this...

[pb]

It's cheaper for companies to outsource some projects to another company and have them do the computing however they can than to rent time on a mainframe.

If you design a cool screensaver to go with it, and make it run on Windows, I'm sure you'll get the support of college students everywhere, even if it beams information back to an evil corporation, does tests on nuclear missle aging, DNA analysis, or hacking your friend's box... They won't know the difference. Of course, it'd be nice to check these things for trojans too.

Yes, this is an application for Beowulf clusters as well; for massively parallel problems, it might be worth setting up shop in that business instead. I bet IBM does just that, for one, but I'm sure they'd rather sell you a mainframe, where possible... :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First sneaky company wins

[mmca]

The first distributed computing company to strike up a deal with Tivo, WebTV, and all the other consumer appliances wins.
Just ship the devices already signed up for the distributed client... how would the user know that the process is running in the background? The app can pick-up/send the work packets when the device calls in to sync (or for webtv when they logon).
Now that I think about it... how do we know that they aren't already doing this???
Also in the case of the medical research they can make it a selling point, "Buy Tivo and help cure AIDS."

This form of distributed computing is VERY limited

[RobertFisher]

(1) It seems that most posters fail to appreciate that this form of distributing computing is limited to problems which are essentially "trivially parallelizable". Anyone who has done parallel computations knows that MOST interesting parallel algorithms MUST exchange information with other processors while doing useful computation. Both the bandwidth and the latency over the internet will NEVER come close to matching what can be found inside a high-end parallel machine where the processors are all mounted in a single unit. The performance of any "coupled" problem, be it a traffic simulation or a climate model, will be absolutely dog poor on these widely distributed computer networks.

All said, this is still a very cool concept for SOME projects, like distributed rendering for films, and analysis of vast quantities of data (ala SETI@home). One shouldn't underestimate the marketing value in a distributed rendering project for a film, either! (Who wouldn't go see a film they had helped render on their PC! Especially if one could "preview" the result as it was being rendered.) But I think that this form of distributed computing will tend to be a niche, rander than a general solution for scientists and technologists with parallel computing needs.

Small is still bigger than nada

[isomeme]

...but I do wonder with these pay schemes if the payment will actually be enough to cover the cost of electricity.

The thing is, any revenue from idle time beats what you get if you just let the cpu burn cycles. Hopefully, if this gets to be a successful business model, the price will get bid up; but a box generating a buck a month off idle time is still (a little bit) more profitable than one that isn't.

There is great potential for abuse

[Hard_Core_Nerdity]

As soon as one company starts giving away money to anyone with spare CPU power, many others companies with similar claims will spring up overnight. Soon there will be so many that people will begin mass mailing viruses or spying programs disguised as programs that pay you. Most people would say that if someone is dumb enough to open attachments in mail from someone thay do not know, they deserve to be spied on and have their important files or even their entire hard drive erased, but this might end up killing the good programs.