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....