ProcessTree Gets Its First (Paying) Client

myosin writes: "ProcessTree (sell your unused cycles for $$$) will soon announce it has its first paying client. Here's the [preliminary] announcement :) From their site: 'The good news is that as soon as the end of the month, some of the suppliers of ProcessTree will be able to earn money with their computers. The bad news is that this only applies to a limited number of participants that will be hand-picked according to the requirements of the project.'" And joe points out (from that same announcement) that "The job is a quality-of-service monitoring system that allows real-time checking on the performance and availability of Web sites. We will initially start with 25 locations, for each of which we plan to have a number of suppliers to provide a 24/7 coverage from each location. Each such group in a location we call an 'ideal machine.'" However, they prefer to trade shekels only for cycles on your permanently connected Windows-based machines for now, thanks.

Comments

Why Windows

[addaon]

I'm wondering why they're choosing windows-based machines for this task. I agree that it makes a lot of sense to hand-pick computers depending on the requirements of the job, and I understand that this job requires 24/7 connections and all. However, it seems to me that it's easier to find a *nix machine that's truly on and connected all the time than a windows machine... especially in the realm of home computers, their target audience, most windows machines will be running 9x, which simply can't be considered 24/7. Is it because they have more development time invested in / more control over the windows software? Or is it just because that's what most of the people signed up for the service have?

the reason they are only using windows for now

[Elby 23]

Since I know lots of you will be whining about this, I thought I'd toss in my two cents.

The reason they are only using Windows seems pretty obvious to me. Windows has the largest desktop marketshare, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of people who have signed up at that site are actually running Windows.

So, logistically, if they really intend to be churning out projects in the future, it makes sense. It takes much less time to develop for a single platform per project.

What this also means to me is that depending on the size of the project, different pools of machines will be used.

-lb

Couldn't pay me enough...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Couldn't pay me enough to run arbitrary code for anonymous third parties.

Design decisions

[Armin Lenz]

Hello there, Armin Lenz from Distributed Science here.

Our decisions to launch with Windows client software first is a simple one: Linux clients are in the works but are under a contractual deadline, which is hard to meet by itself. As we provide updates, Linux clients will be rolled out as well, in particular because Linux boxes are considered 24/7 reliable (unless they are dial-up, of course).

A large number of the locations chosen for the first run are in Asia and South Africa. If you have a suitable machine and were not called upon directly, don't worry, the project is supposed to expand to several hundred locations over time and if you are in a sizeable city, chances are good that we'll have use for you there.

All this is independent of processing jobs that require computing time or storage capacity. Projects of this kind will be rolled out later, we are responding to customer demand first and try to get as much of the ProcessTree network utilized so the suppliers can earn some money.