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Gateway Puts Wasted Cycles to Work
f. liszt writes "Gateway will be offering for sale to corporations the processing power available from networked display PCs in their stores -- seems like a logical enough idea."
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Easy, use a model similar to seti. First, each packet is processed twice, by two different machines. If you get different results, go back and do some checking. That is also assuming everything is encrypted and the binary is somewhat secure also. If processing each one twice wastes too much power, do every 3 or whatever, and if you run into a problem re-analyze the machines past few packets to see where it started. And obviously if you get bad packets it should be fairly easy to track the machine down and correct it.
Your company payroll dependant on machines that shoppers can tinker with wihle on display at a store?
The user of a properly administered public kiosk (i.e. kiosk user is a normal user, not root) won't be able to affect any process that his account doesn't own.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Gateway is using the National Science Foundation "Grid" protocol for connecting computers. Originally designed for scientific supercomputing, some commercial sites are using it.
Tell that to the poor tech in Georgia who was getting sued by his employer for doing the exact same thing:
m l
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23477.ht
It hurts nothing until it's your ass getting kicked.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Some perspective is in order. While I don't think the article mentioned whose solution Gateway was using, most grid computing platforms running on untrusted machines are going to use encryption, most machines aren't going to look at enough of a job to be useful even if the encryption was broken, and each individual job is going to be run on multiple machines to ensure one machine doesn't (intentionally or not) return faulty data.
What data would people pay to have crunched in public ? Well, I can tell you that animation houses, financial shops and biotechnology companies are all crunching their data "in public".
UD is also the software enabler behind Gateway's Processing On Demand
and UD also happens to be my employer</disclaimer>
<grub> Reading
There are many computational problems that require far more power than a 50-100 person company can easily pay for. 'Fabless' semiconductor manufacturers and small drug discovery companies are two examples. Even for larger companies, renting time can make a lot of sense if they have an infrequent need for large processing power.
Something else to consider is that unlike most corporations, Gateway continually rotates the newest machines available into their showrooms, so their grid will always be growing in power.
They are using the United Devices Alliance MeteProcessor.
The incremental cost of electricity for a computer that is idle verses one running at 100% CPU is actually very, very small.
If we assume that the CPU draws 60W more at 100% use than at 0% (Intel lists maximum heat disipation of 60W for the P4), then 8,000 computers would consume a total of 480kW. Sounds like a lot, right? Now consider that so far today, California has had a maximum power draw of 28,000GW, which is 58 *million* times more than 480kW. And that's just one state.