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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.
Seems they would have a hard time guaranteeing security.
...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.
They must have one hell of an inventory problem if they are resorting to this for some extra cash!
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
hmmmm...a company selling idle time with their product models to make money...doesn't sound like a bad idea...i think victoria's secret should get in on this...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
They should donate the time to something like the SETI@home project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu) or the protein folding project (http://folding.stanford.edu), both of which use distributed computing and neither of which need to be concerned with security.
"It's the crazy backwards universe, where up is down and boy bands play instruments." -Tino, The Weekenders
I heard about export limitations concerning computers...
Now, if Gateway starts selling CPU cycles, how can they guarantee that this won't be used by organisations located in these embargo'ed countries ?
Otherwise, if they can control this, this means they are selling some spyware... the CPU cycles are just a Trojan.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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?
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
All these new Desktop computers seem to have Power Down buttons on the keyboard and i love pressing them while walking tru a computer store....
Sorry....thats just the way i am....cant help it
"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?
Why not just run the Cancer agent on them? The publicity generated from this will certainly be worth more for Gateway than selling processor time, simply considering how much money (and time) it would cost to set up the network.
Gateway Inc, increasing their profit by a total of $2000, $1000 of which will go to the Long Island, NY store that found the winning key. Gateway stock (NYSE:GTW) immediately went up to to 3.51 from a previous $3.50 per share following the announcement.
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.
mayby they can also split the data into small chunks that aren't worth it alone. (like in a packet switched network)
;)
one would somehow have to sniff their whole network and access to just one machine wouldn't be enough anymore.
this whole asking the saleguy thing remembers me of us going to our local computer dealer in win3.11-times for the fun of 'format c:'. They found ways to stop us pretty fast
Yes, but is there a way for a company to tap into their own extra processing power? Is there a Intranet style version of the application/delivery they will use?
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.
ummm, it doesn't say anything about when he found out about it, just that he installed it a year ago...personally, i've been aware of SETI@HOME for a couple of years now...that doesn't mean that i've installed it on my computer though...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
They want money, and they want guaranteed steady money projects, not just a chance at money with RSA.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
When you're buying the display model you already wave the expectation that the computer is new.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Pet store hamster wheels sell power to the grid!
- - - Patent applied for and deliver us from evil
The corporation I work for has 110,000 desktop PCs. Never mind the servers.
Any corporation or even small business I've known has no problem getting CPU power, you're right. If things are desperate, they can hook up a bunch of old monitor-less pentium 1's and 2's as a Beowulf cluster and use that. Aside from those processing weather and DNA data, what the world is truly hungry for is bandwidth.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 $20 or so over 6 months.
If you think about it, that might make more sense than buying CPU time.
Software architectures already exist which could be used. COSM is a free example, though I suspect the licensing may rule that out in a commercial environment. More stuff here: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Computer _Science/Distributed_Computing/Platforms/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"Gateway has 272 Gateway Country stores. With 7,800 floor model PCs, ..."
...
1. Install distributed computing client on first PC.
2. Install distributed computing client on second PC.
3. Install distributed computing client on third PC.
4.
...
...
7801. Profit!
I have a suggestion for Gateway's CTO: Calculate the money you've made running SETI@Home and the cancer project on your desktop for the last year, and multiply that by 7,800. That's what you can expect.
Does anyone know any technical details about this projects.
Do they indent to do LAM/MPI style communications or will it push the client code and execute it independe3ntly (ie. a SETI type project).
It's really an issue of weather or not all the nodes are equals on the network or not..
And yes, there are MAC and Linux clients:
http://folding.stanford.edu/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It is M$ gimmick. They're gonna take your snaps while shopping PCs. Have a look at this new technology that takes snap through monitor.
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
[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...
This would seem like a great idea for those who are looking to cut costs and may not have a user for the required equipment once the current project is done. Sure you can try to resell stuff, but there is no promise of a sale, and it takes time and money to get rid of old equipment.
While this might not be a good idea for the mega-coorporations. It could work for smaller groups (and even local governments).
Though it is true that sensitive data couldn't be handled in this way.
GWB: Ha! We've just discovered your plans, damn terrorist!
Saddam: Terrorist for what?
GWB: UN inspectors just found these mass destruction weapons plans on your PC.
Saddam: Heh, check better, yankee. That's a mirror of YOUR mass destruction weapons plans at the Pentagon! We just sold some processing power and storage space to your network.
GWB: Oh...
Saddam: Wait. One more thing.
GWB: What?
Saddam: Here's the bill. Cash only, thanks.
Now you can hack Exxon just by going to Gateway Country!
Seriously, given the vulnerabilities of Windows and lack of security traditionally found on floor model PCs, not to mention the thought that hundreds of people a day have access to the PCs, I don't expect many companies will take up Gateways offer.
Sounds interesting, maybe HP/Compaq should consider trying it this Christmas. I hear that they're going to have a lot of computers sitting around idle ...
This guy can ALWAYS use computing power ... and it appears as though he has money to burn! I'm sure that he'd buy processing power in bulk!!!!
I wonder how much bandwidth is included in Crap-way's "processing power" price .... and if they threw in a couple SMTP servers .... that would be a steal!
:)
/. regularly, this is a (weak) follow-up to this article about our favorite person, notorious email spam king, Alan Ralsky. :)
This way, customers could come to the Gateway store for a sneak preview of the spam email they would be receiving that week! Everybody wins!!!
BTW: For those people the don't read
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
I've always thought that a PC manufacturer could use the thousand or so PCs that are in burn-in at any given time for render farms or other parallelized projects.
in 2000 when I was gainfully employed by Gateway, I has RC5-64 running on about 20 systems, shot our rankings through the roof :)
:)
This really isn't that bad of an idea, just as long as the info being crunched, as said before, is of a non-proprietary nature. However, I HIGHLY doubt that UD/Stanford/SETI would be willing to shell out x^5 dollars for a crack at the Gateway network, they'll always have people like me who do it for fun
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.
Enron could have used this concept to balance their books.
Trolling is a art,
This is a great idea and will work fine. For the 2-3 people that go to Gateway Country to hack the computers, you won't be doing much. Soon someone will come over and kick you out and restart whatever you tried to screw up. Just beacuse you can do it doesn't mean that you should (it is illegal afterall).
Anyway, in the end, this is brilliant, and I'm surprized that it took so long. Though I really feel that the only companies that will be able to utilize this ar ethe Drug companies to take care of some algorithms for them. A random hacker will have to spend their entire life trying to hack through to figure out what exactly is going on. The hacker will have 0 knowledge of what is being run on those computers and won't have the first clue as to what to make of the data. Stop pretending that these compuers are just made for hacking and breaking into. If this is what you're doing day in and day out, pick up a book or get a real job.
Anyway, I hope that this idea takes off and that others can really benefit from this. What would be ever better is if some comapanies "dontate" their spare computer time to organizations that try to produce results much like Corporations. That would greatly benefit everyone, and if people are hacking in and trying to break this...then they're just causing society more grief.
hey, an extra 10MM can't hurt Gateway all that much can it?
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
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.
Now, that's called true multitasking !!!! Utilizing their resources, while on display, is brilliant. I agree that may not find many corporate clients, but what about supporting the open source community ? Developers can play with the grid, or enthusiasts can experiment with this concept. International organizations such as WHO which do not need to keep their research confidential can also exploit this setup. The other advantage here is that these gateway machines will not be loaded with heavy applications (MS apps on corporate computers will minimize the contribution of that's computer's processing power!. Atleast Gateway is trying to be constructive....
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
I'm pretty sure that if we get into this whole distributed computing thing and it gets so big it starts to evolve into a neural network and decides that it should be in charge of us that we should make sure that it is a bunch of Linux boxes that takes over because then everything would be like open and free at least, and we could still wear Tshirts and jeans. Or if not that, then the new net master is OSX based, because then we'd have really cool uniforms and stuff and everyone would have all day to write songs and draw comics. That would be cool. What I don't want is for this Gateway/Windows thing to become sentient, because then we would have a world dominated by an evil Master who numbed out our creative impulses, tortured us with relentless conformity, and controlled all political and economic traffic. Pretty much like it is now, come to think of it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
I used to think the same way until I took a class that dealt heavily with ethics. If what you say is true, then a company should illegally dump toxic waste if the increase in profit outweighs the potential loss if they get caught. Can you really argue that position? If so, I think you seriously need to examine your priorities.
I'm not saying that Gateway using their CPU cycles for profit rather than public gain is analogous to dumping toxic waste, but to say that the only duty of a company is to profit represents (to me) a good bit of what is wrong with the corporate world today.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
That would defeat the purpose of generating revenue. Not everybody wants to give everything away, least of all stockholders.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
Open mail relays!
Spammers are already using a great deal of other peoples' computing power without compensating them any for the cycles used, the black eye of blacklisting, etc.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Salesman: And here's the new top of the line Gateway, it's so fast you'll be able to browse the web and balance your checkbook in human time, just like you could on a 200Mhz Pentium.
Customer: Why does the mouse lag behind by 2-3 seconds when I move it.
Salesman: Uhhh.. because Gateway is selling the CPU cycles of their demo machines to someone else and Windows is giving the number cruncher more priority than the mouse interrupts.
Customer: Yeah, right - how about this iMac over here, it looks fast.
11*43+456^2
A terraflop is not a trillion operations per second , it's a trillion floating-point instructions per second. Floating-point instructions are expensive on intel/amd hardware, even with a deditcated FPU.
Maybe someone should hit them with a suit for false advertising.
UD is also the software enabler behind Gateway's Processing On Demand
and UD also happens to be my employer</disclaimer>
<grub> Reading
Sometimes I get a feeling that MS Windows is already doing this behind our back. Is there ANY sane reason why a 1Ghz machine should take 2 seconds to switch between two programs???
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.
I wonder if Gateway didn't think of charity. This way reactions are the company must be in some kind of trouble. If they would have donated the CPU-cycles to charity (I'm thinking of united devices or something like that) I guess publicity would have been on their hands.
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
As I said, they need the organisational and software skills to make use of the power they have available. And IT management with some vision... and balls. This is the real issue.
You are right!
As usual, the technological problems are the easy ones. The difficult problems in this area are managerial. And if you have any experience dealing with wetware, you know that it takes a lot more than balls and vision to get this kind of thing implemented properly. It takes money, lots of it, for planning, training, meetings, and all the other crap that has to be done when dealing with people.
Seems to me like Gateway is offering something very interesting that could affect a lot of "make or buy, or do without" decisions. If they can sell time on their grid for less than the TCO of developing and maintaining an in-house grid, then they've got a winner. They'll be able to sell service to your company, even though you've got eleventy jillion workstations sitting around, because management will see that its more costly to get you-all to get your act together than to buy Gateway's service.
They are using the United Devices Alliance MeteProcessor.
Proof you don't know what you're talking about. It's pretty hard to accidentally hit the Power key on the older Mac keyboards. Aside from that, there are multiple options in the dialog that pops up: Restart, Shut Down, Sleep and of course Cancel. All very useful to have in a one key shortcut.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Gateway's plan could have use to smaller businesses. Assuming that you pay for the entire computer day, that's $3.60 per PC.
:)
Look at the economics of the situation: "renting" 200 computers (averaging 2.0 Ghz) for a day is going to be $720... The cost of buying the equivalent number of Microtels from Walmart.com is (assuming 800 Mhz Duons have half the CPU performance), 400 machines at 300 dollars == $120,000. Plus electricity, networking, etc.
What's going to be Problem #1 is who Gateway sells this to. Large companies and enterprises will already have an extensive network of PCs. That pretty much leaves small and medium sized companies that need a lot of processing power in a very short time, with the loss of one or more pieces not effecting the whole. (The only "common" app that I can think of customers would be computer-generated animation... but I need more caffeine
Problem #2 is setup, software, and licensing. I don't think Gateway is going to flick a switch at 9:00 PM and have their WinXP computers start running BSD, Linux, etc. On top of that, what will the set-up cost be? Will companies be paying $20/hour per tech to install the software, or is it remote installation with a flat fee? But the killer will be licenses... unless the company is using free or homebrew applications, will they have to pay for each computer in the cluster?
It could work for Gateway. If they give free upgrades when new machines come in, and performance guarantees (if a PC isn't performing at 100%), it might catch on. But like another poster said, CPU cycles are fairly cheap, but bandwidth is expensive.
A few years ago, there was a company named Jostens that examined their IT costs. Jostens is in the class ring business. If you've got a high school ring or college ring, chances are that you bought it from Jostens.
Anyway, somebody at Jostens took a look at their IT department and had a brilliant idea: everything these fools in IT did came out as a debit somewhere on the company spreadsheet, so why not try to turn that around? Make those slackers earn their keep? So, Jostens became a class ring AND consulting company.
I said this was to be a tale of woe and heartbreak, and I did not lie to you. Jostens found that the consulting business was MUCH different than the class ring business, and that they weren't any good at it. Jostens lost a lot of money, and their silliness was splashed across papers such as the Wall Street Journal. So, Jostens learned the hard way that sometimes what accountants like to call a debit really isn't such a thing at all. Many manager types learned for the first time that IT adds value to an organization and that domination of the class ring market doesn't automatically mean success in another market.
So what does this have to do with anything? It seems to me someone at Gateway took a look at their accounting spreadsheets, noticed that the company owns a lot of PC's that aren't being used for ANYTHING. All they do is sit in the stores, and cost money. Bright idea: let's actually USE those computers for something - make them earn their keep! The rest of the Gateway story doesn't need to be related here. Essentially Dell lives happily ever after.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Uhm, oops. That should be the MetaProcessor, not MeteProcessor.
*wipes egg off face*
Gateway enters the top 5 of supercomputers with the world's largest Beowulf cluster.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So when and where exactly would they install the software for this.
Would they leave it up to the technicians (ha! salespeople) at each retail outlet? Or would they include it as part of the disk image installed at the factory where the software runs automatically on bootup?
My guess would be the second option.
This would however mean that *every* Gateway computer sold includes the required software, and the end users who buy from Gateway may well end up as part of a distributed computing project without their explicit permission. All it needs is some obscure legal mumbo in fine print and users have no recourse should they find out.
A better business model for Gateway and companies that have access to a large amount of PCs idling might be to donate the spare cycles to a charity and take a tax break. There is not much downside to this and there are lots of upsides such as it does not acutally have to work very well to get the writeoff versus trying to make it profitable as well as being able to advertise how they are trying to make a difference.
How long before someone cracks their network and makes this into the largest DDoS tool ever?
FWIW, My Mac Cube G4 switches off the moment I use my garmin rino within 3 feet of it.
Imagine my surprise the first time I found this out
And yes it is true. It also switches it back on again, but that's little consolation.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
The item marked * above can be simply answered "Well don't use it if you're worried". The IP issues may be the sticking point.
If what you say is true, then a company should illegally dump toxic waste if the increase in profit outweighs the potential loss if they get caught. Can you really argue that position?
From Fight Club:
Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Personally, I have no trouble believing that the above sort of thing really does go on to some degree. Corporate ethics? Do those words go together anymore? IMHO, the only reasons large corporations do anything honorable are so they can make television commercials about how touchy-feely they are and how much they care about (the Earth's ecosystem/global warming/some endangered species/saving you money/making the world safe for your children/etc). Hell, half the time they're probably just doing something required by law and expecting that people won't know that.
To heavily paraprhase Chris Rock, "an unethical corporation brags about shit an ethical corporation just does":
"I take care of my employees!"
"You supposed to, ya dumb muthafucka!!!"
"Our CFO ain't never been indicted for securities fraud!"
"Whatcha want, a cookie?!?"
~Philly
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
What I need is a way to use the nearly 650 Gig of wasted space across our student lab PCs as student storage. Plenty of room for enough redundancy to not even need a backup (students are told to keep their own backups anyway). Currently our nearly 1,000 students share 6Gig on one server.
Can I have their idle store employees run my hot dog stand.
I am just a user but I am happy that UD won another big agreement.
What I think is, whats good for UD, is good for ongoing cancer project I contribute for year. ( http://www.intel.com/cancer ).
It would also give you a clue the amount of PR you made with this project. Er, I bet you already know.
Especially since most of the time they don't let the customer get past the screensaver!
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.