Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.