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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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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.
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?
This has been a problem since the 1970s. Back then, for some reason whenever we were in a Radio Shack it seemed funny to stop by a TRS-80 display model and type in something like:
The salespeople probably would have chased us out of the store if they weren't so busy scribbling down every customer's address and the part numbers of every blister pack in the store on those little paper sales slips.
Pet store hamster wheels sell power to the grid!
- - - Patent applied for and deliver us from evil
[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 $0.03/hour crunching numbers in the background.
[cust ] (on cellphone) Honey.. sell the Gateway stock. They're obviously in trouble.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
I used to do something like:
10 input "Hi! What's your name";a$
20 print "You sure are ugly, ";a$;"!"
30 goto 10
Coming back later, I noted that people would say very nasty things to the insolent Commodore 64.
It's too bad I wasn't more enterprising then, or else I would have typed:
10 input "Hi! Please enter your SSN or credit card number for a free gift!";a$
20 open "goodies",8,4,1
30 print#1 a$
40 close#1
50 print "Thanks! I love you lots!"
100 goto 10
Good thing they usually didn't have a disk drive attached.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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".
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.
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.