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Sounds analogous to understanding an electricity grid and power generation. Distributing CPU power (decentralizing it) by having more people run servers in the

Sounds analogous to understanding an electricity grid and power generation. Distributing CPU power (decentralizing it) by having more people run servers in their homes is the Internet equivalent to rooftop solar.

vonklaus 11y ago
Understanding how the electricity grid works is non-trivial, maybe I am mischaracterizing your suggestion that it is not. Digital Ocean, a smaller provider, has 64gb memory 6 core intel cpu in a single server[1]. These are wired up into a cluster or clusters and probably plug in to a backbone provider like level3 or a big ISP. Small fish, last time i looked they have a half dozen or so regions with a few zones. AWS tries to limit data centers to 100k servers, most being between 50-80k servers per data center.with a power capacity of 25-40megawatts[2]. So no, I don't think you could just get a few people to run servers in their house and offset that. You also connect through an ISP. ISP can turn your connection off. Google is an ISP, runs popular DNS name servers, sells web donains, sells certificates, etc. so, they have a business at every level of the layer from hardware to application. I guess I just take the positiom that we should know what percentage of power, routing and flow these guys control. [1]https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-are-the-server-specs-that-my-vps-s-are-running-on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-are-th... [2]http://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-amazon-cloud-computing-infrastructure/ http://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-amazon-cloud-computing-...
- decasteve 11y ago
  I'm not/wasn't suggesting people running servers in their houses would/could offset data centres. Just as rooftop solar could not replace large power plants. Your comment made me think that understanding how computing power is employed and distributed, and how that information is propagated, sounds a lot like the distribution and routing of electricity. The problems being non-trivial to understand. If we consider what the average person uses in terms of computational power, bandwidth and storage, and how many people an individual shares content with, like they would on Facebook, using email, et c., then a server in the home with appropriate software could easily cover that requirement. If we consider the requirements of publishing content to a mass audience, then individuals running home servers would not cover this (at least not yet). Just as everyone with rooftop solar could not power the requirements of factories.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    Sorry I misunderstood, this is an interesting concept. You mean that, we could look at demand and the back that out to get the neccessary total. This would be super interesting. If you could find, with a reasonable statistical likelihood that demand is D and computing power is C, if there was a large inexplained discrepency you could calculate the size of skunkworks projects.

vonklaus 11y ago

Understanding how the electricity grid works is non-trivial, maybe I am mischaracterizing your suggestion that it is not. Digital Ocean, a smaller provider, has 64gb memory 6 core intel cpu in a single server[1]. These are wired up into a cluster or clusters and probably plug in to a backbone provider like level3 or a big ISP. Small fish, last time i looked they have a half dozen or so regions with a few zones. AWS tries to limit data centers to 100k servers, most being between 50-80k servers per data center.with a power capacity of 25-40megawatts[2]. So no, I don't think you could just get a few people to run servers in their house and offset that. You also connect through an ISP. ISP can turn your connection off. Google is an ISP, runs popular DNS name servers, sells web donains, sells certificates, etc. so, they have a business at every level of the layer from hardware to application. I guess I just take the positiom that we should know what percentage of power, routing and flow these guys control. [1]https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-are-the-server-specs-that-my-vps-s-are-running-on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/what-are-th... [2]http://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-amazon-cloud-computing-infrastructure/ http://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-amazon-cloud-computing-...

decasteve 11y ago
I'm not/wasn't suggesting people running servers in their houses would/could offset data centres. Just as rooftop solar could not replace large power plants. Your comment made me think that understanding how computing power is employed and distributed, and how that information is propagated, sounds a lot like the distribution and routing of electricity. The problems being non-trivial to understand. If we consider what the average person uses in terms of computational power, bandwidth and storage, and how many people an individual shares content with, like they would on Facebook, using email, et c., then a server in the home with appropriate software could easily cover that requirement. If we consider the requirements of publishing content to a mass audience, then individuals running home servers would not cover this (at least not yet). Just as everyone with rooftop solar could not power the requirements of factories.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  Sorry I misunderstood, this is an interesting concept. You mean that, we could look at demand and the back that out to get the neccessary total. This would be super interesting. If you could find, with a reasonable statistical likelihood that demand is D and computing power is C, if there was a large inexplained discrepency you could calculate the size of skunkworks projects.