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

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.