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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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Your company payroll dependant on machines that shoppers can tinker with wihle on display at a store?
Seriously, what data would you pay to have crunched in public?
The truth shall set you free!
The corporation I work for has 110,000 desktop PCs. Never mind the servers.
They have plenty of processing power.
What they need is the internal organisation and the software skills to make use of their existing investment in systems.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
...they'll start selling the idle time on their customers computers to other customers.
After all, that Pentium IV has plenty of power left over since it's probably only running an e-mail app and web-broswer (and a virus or two, and some spyware, and probably Kazaa and WinMX...)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Absolutely. And the corporate intranet is much faster and secure than sending data all over net and getting it processed.
My 2e-2 cents.
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
It's a shame these systems are left on in the first place.
What is the power consumption of these systems? What a waste of cheap electricity.
If you need high availability, great, leave it on. If you are not going to use it, turn it off.
It's not exactly free for gateway to wire every single machine to the net, including the the extra cost of maxing out the cpu. It DOES take more power when your cpu is at 100% compared to 0%. More power == higher electricity bills.
Grand idea i suppose, but it's going to cost them a pretty penny just to hook all of them up.
- tristan
"Gateway has 272 Gateway Country stores. With 7,800 floor model PCs, ..."
The advantage, for customers, is the price. For an introductory price of 15 cents per computer hour, plus set-up fees, Gateway is making the power of supercomputing available to companies that might not be able to afford it otherwise. "
If they were (extremely theoretically) able to sell all their computing power for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year their income would be:
15c * 7800 computers = $1170/hour
$28080 / day
$10249200 / year.
Not too shabby - but somehow the similarities between this business model and (let's say) web advertising to support an otherwise loss-making venture make me shiver.
I imagine some Gateway exec is sitting in his cow-themed office rubbing his hands with glee looking at those figures. Good luck making it happen!
A little planning goes a long way...
I don't understand why companies don't include such things on new PCs as an option.
.EXE file for Folding@Home (or one of the lesser projects :), a link on the desktop and an explanation of what the user can do with his/her idle CPU time. The number crunching power of millions upon millions of PCs wouldn't go to waste.
Just include the
While a Sysadmin at a very large hotel chain, which I can't specify (but it's a BIGGUN'), I used every machine on the network to fold protein. Did the math once and it came out to being something like a 80GHz machine w/ a couple gigs of RAM.
We even got as high as 22 in the overall rankings.
I recommend that other people in charge of large networks do the same. It hurts NOTHING, but could do a lot of good.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Can the CPU cycles on in store computers, really be worth enough in the market to make up for the administration headaches / overhead? They can't charge too high a price, as they will be competing with volunteer networks and all sorts of venders selling off their customers idle cpu cycles, and while you might have fairly high bandwidth between cpus within one store, communication between locations will probably be simply over the internet.
How much intersite traffic will this generate over gateway's ISP? Are they selling just the CPU cycles? All paralized computations will need some communications between nodes, how much do you get with your $0.15/hour?
Perhaps instead, they should sell advertising space on the screens of idle computers if they need some cash. Any computer, anywhere in the world can donate/sell its CPU cycles, I would think the market price for CPU cycles will be quite low. But not every computer in the world as hundreds of shoppers walking past it all day long with big wads of cash in their pockets.
There were a couple of companies that tried this. Process Tree springs to mind. I ran a client for a while t from a different company which was called something like Capacity Calibration. Basically testing connectivity and response time to web sites from a distributed group of computers. I think they paid me $20 or so over 6 months.
If you think about it, that might make more sense than buying CPU time.
[sales] And here we have our 300 series machine
[cust ] Neat! (opens IE)
[cust ] It seems a little slow opening up a browser; I thought you said it was fast?
[sales] It is! It just appears slow because we're maxing out the processor.
[cust ] Why would you do that on a display machine that's supposed to be showing off the machine's strengths?
[sales] We make $0.03/hour crunching numbers in the background.
[cust ] (on cellphone) Honey.. sell the Gateway stock. They're obviously in trouble.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
big corporation and caring about others....
They're a publicly traded company. If they were using their resources to do anything other than increase shareholder value, their shareholders would rightfully be pissed. The company's only duty is to increase shareholder value. If the company does that, then it's up to the shareholders to do what they want with the increased value - and if they want, they can donate it to charity themselves. But I, for one, as a shareholder wouldn't want MY company deciding which charities or causes they should be spending what is essentially MY money on. I can do that myself well enough.
I suppose the duct tape over the power and reset buttons falls under the topic of properly administered?
What the PHBs want is proof-of-concept. And no, any amount of links to SETI@home/folding@home/DNET project will not sink in.
So this is a good thing for the level of knowledge in distributed computing in general.
BTW 2e-2 $ == 2 cents
2e-2 cents == 0.02 cents