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Could Wikipedia Become a Supercomputer?
An anonymous reader writes "Large websites represent an enormous resource of untapped computational power. This short post explains how a large website like Wikipedia could give a tremendous contribution to science, by harnessing the computational power of its readers' CPUs and help solve difficult computational problems." It's an interesting thought experiment, at least — if such a system were practical to implement, what kind of problems would you want it chugging away at?
There is already existing infrastructure and projects where people can donate their system's computational power: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Only if bitten by a radiaoactive calculator!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Wikipedia is a clusterfuck of little tiny fiefdoms. And you expect them to solve actual problems? hahahahaha.
Wikipedia could use that computing power to harvest bitcoins so that they'll never have to beg for money again. It's a brilliant plan.
Sure, it would come up with a solution pretty quickly, but then that solution would get edited, then the edit would be attacked by the supercomputer's moderating subroutine, then there would be a flame war on the discussion page occupying a large percentage of the total cycles. Then the solution would be locked and you couldn't see it or see a graph of it because there was no graph of it in the public domain.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
if i want to contribute computing power somewhere for free then there are ways to do it already
if wikipedia needs money, i can donate something or pay something.
But *please* i use wikipedia often, maybe primarily, on my tablet. I dont think that abusing an ARM processor running on Battery power connected via an instable and slow internet connection will help a lot.
PluraProcessing has a cloud computing platform like the idea in this article. Customers pay Plura to perform computations and Plura outsources the computations to the browsers that are visiting its affiliate's websites. This is an interesting way to monetize the Web. Would you rather view ads or rent off some of your CPU / memory?
Let me tell you a little story:
Once upon a time, shortly after an asteroid impact wiped out the vacuum tubes; but before Steve Jobs invented aluminum, we had computers that plugged into the wall, with CPUs that ran all the time at pretty much the same power level. Even when idle. Back in those days, had most people's schedulers not kind of sucked, there may actually have been some "free" CPU time floating about.
Now, back to the present: On average, today's computer has a pretty substantial delta between power at full load and power at idle. This is almost 100% certainly the case if the computer is a laptop or embedded device of some kind(which is also where the difference in battery life will come to the user's notice most quickly). CPU load gets converted into heat, power draw, and fan noise within moments of being imposed.
Now, it still might be the case that wikipedia readers are feeling altruistic; but, if so, javascript is an unbelievably inefficient mechanism for attacking the sort of problems where you would want a large distributed computing system. A java plugin would be much better, an application better still, at which point you are right back to today, where we have a number of voluntary distributed computing projects.
If they wished to enforce, rather then persuade, they'd run into the unpleasant set of problems with people blocking/throttling/lying about the results of/etc. the computations being farmed out. Given wikipedia's popularity, plugins for doing so in all major browsers would be available within about 15 minutes. Even without them, most modern browsers pop up some sort of "a script on this page is using more CPU time than humanity possessed when you were born to twiddle the DOM to no apparent effect, would you like to give it the fate it deserves?" message if JS starts eating enough time to hurt responsiveness.
In summary: Terrible Plan.
Q: Will wikipedia become a supercomputer?
A: It turns out that there are stupid questions.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I have a better idea!
Instead of resorting to nuclear power, think of the untapped resource of the common household hamster!
All those wheels, spinning and turning - all that energy going to waste! Every hamster owning house should have a miniature turbine inside it, powered by the hamster. Think of the energy it'll generate! Why, after only a year, your single solitary hamster will probably have generated enough power to power a lightbulb for a few minutes! Assuming your hamster lives that long.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I'll be interested to see if any /.ers can propose genuinely significant problems that would be solvable by a 100fold or even 1000fold increase in processing power.
I guess it depends on how you define "significant." My guess is that there are a lot of areas of science that could benefit from massive computing resources, not because it would magically solve problems, but because it would enable researchers to explore more hypotheses and be more efficient while doing so. The reason they're not using existing resources like DOE supercomputers is because many of these applications are (not unreasonably) perceived as wasteful and inefficient, but if petaflop-class distributed systems became widely accessible, this argument would vanish.
I personally find some of the hype about Folding@Home to be overblown (it's not going to cure cancer or replace crystallography, folks), but it's actually an excellent example of the kind of problem that's ill-suited towards traditional HPC but a perfect fit for distributed systems. The molecular dynamics simulations that it runs are not hugely time consuming on their own, but there is a huge sampling problem: only a tiny fraction of the simulations have the desired result. So they run tens or hundreds of thousands of simulations on their network, and get the answer they want. There are other examples like this, also in protein structure; it turns out that you can solve some X-ray crystal structures by brute-force computing instead of often laborious experimental methods involving heavy atoms. This isn't common practice because it requires 1000s of processors to happen in a reasonable amount of time - and it still may not work. But if every biology department had a petaflop cluster available, it would be much more popular.
More generally, if we suddenly gained 100- or 1000-fold increase in processing power, habits would change. My lab recently bought several 48-core systems (which are insanely cheap), and we're starting to do things with them that we would have considered extravagant before. Nothing world-changing, and nothing that would have been outright impossible on older systems, but the boost in efficiency is very noticeable - time that would have been spent waiting for the computers to finish crunching numbers is spent analyzing results and generating new datasets instead.
Please, for the love of all that is sane, do not press enter just because you've reached the edge of the textbox. Some of us actually have desktop sized screens, and reading a column of text that only occupies 1/4 of it is excruciatingly painful.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.