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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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I'd understood Gateway's stated business goal as being "get back to the basics" of what made them popular: targeting the consumer, and focusing on direct sales. I'm not clear how either seeling cycles to corporate clients or continuing its stores fits into that. Perhaps this is a way to subsidize their stores.
I'd think it'd be more interesting to see them do some serious research into exploiting this type of service. Lord knows that hardware R&D is dead.
Like, what about selling this as an on-demand service to consumers? What about this as a distinguishing factor for people into video editing or rendering? Those aren't necessarily lossless applications, IMIO (in my ignorant opinion). It'd be cool to be able to have an on-demand render farm for small-budget indie movie releases, no?
It's already been tried. Several companies have come and gone trying to sell distributed computing. The secret is: there's no market for it! None! It's been tried and has failed. Any company that needs serious crunch power already has it within their own organization. Hell, shitty little Intel chips can do much more than the average PC user will ever need 'em to do. Universities occasionally need more power for esoteric physics problems, but they can't afford to pay. Hell, even SETI@Home couldn't even get enough data in fast enough to be processed. I can't imagine that there's that much demand out there for something like this, if any.
The software is push-based, just like the software you can download to participate in our global research projects. Unlike many other distributed computing clients though, ours has the ability to update itself, which greatly reduces administration overhead.
Also, although the client software normally operates independantly in a push-based manner, it is possible to do MPI as well, it just has to be coded as part of the actual application software.