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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.
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'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
"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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"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..
[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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.