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Somebody should make a startup that allows people to sell access to their computers by the minute. Like spot instances in the cloud ... in people's basements. T

by ant6n 11y ago

Somebody should make a startup that allows people to sell access to their computers by the minute. Like spot instances in the cloud ... in people's basements. The true sharing economy.

manav 11y ago
IO is the bottleneck there for most applications, but there are some massively distributed grid computing projects that run on BOINC like Seti@HOME.
eximius 11y ago
That sounds like a nightmare. You'd have zero uptime guarantees!
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  Would you? What if you limited people to writing in a domain specific language: one that ran distributed on this infrastructure? How would that make it different than folding at home, for example?
- Johnny555 11y ago
  Does Amazon have any instance uptime guarantees?
  - joombaga 11y ago
    Yes, >99.95% Monthly Uptime Percentage. "“Monthly Uptime Percentage” is calculated by subtracting from 100% the percentage of minutes during the month in which Amazon EC2 or Amazon EBS, as applicable, was in the state of “Region Unavailable.” Monthly Uptime Percentage measurements exclude downtime resulting directly or indirectly from any Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusion (defined below)." https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/
    - Johnny555 11y ago
      That's a regional outage, they provide no SLA for individual instances: Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusions... (v) that result from failures of individual instances or volumes not attributable to Region Unavailability Presumably if you're using a cloud hosted in people's basements, if someone's basement server dies, you'd just pick one from someone else's basement, so this model could provide better availability than AWS.
- ant6n 11y ago
  Like Amazon spot instances. People follow habits, so you can make uptime predictions.
Razengan 11y ago
Why not just move forward to realizing some sort of distributed/decentralized internet? Something like a combination of Freenet, TOR, BOINC, blockchain etc. technologies, using the current "legacy" internet as a backbone, where anyone can voluntarily offer their computing and storage resources to the network at varying levels of participation. Say you could offer your laptop as a simple discovery/directory node to simply help others connect and find stuff, and your desktop as either a static-content serving node or as a computation node that can host distributed applications, like SETI@home or web apps like Facebook. Maybe even reward cryptocurrency to those who offer the most resources.
- manav 11y ago
  There is Gridcoin which is a cryptocurrency that rewards for BOINC projects. I wouldn't be surprised if certain services became more centralized, offloading computing to the cloud. Consumer grade devices would become thin clients (like back in the day). NVIDIA has hinted in this direction, I can remember something about GaaS (Gaming as a Service).
dsl 11y ago
Various companies have tried this. What you end up with is 99% of your workforce is compromised machines, and law enforcement at your door every other day asking where checks are being mailed.

by ant6n 11y ago

Somebody should make a startup that allows people to sell access to their computers by the minute. Like spot instances in the cloud ... in people's basements. The true sharing economy.

manav 11y ago

IO is the bottleneck there for most applications, but there are some massively distributed grid computing projects that run on BOINC like Seti@HOME.

eximius 11y ago

That sounds like a nightmare. You'd have zero uptime guarantees!

odonnellryan 11y ago
Would you? What if you limited people to writing in a domain specific language: one that ran distributed on this infrastructure? How would that make it different than folding at home, for example?
Johnny555 11y ago
Does Amazon have any instance uptime guarantees?
- joombaga 11y ago
  Yes, >99.95% Monthly Uptime Percentage. "“Monthly Uptime Percentage” is calculated by subtracting from 100% the percentage of minutes during the month in which Amazon EC2 or Amazon EBS, as applicable, was in the state of “Region Unavailable.” Monthly Uptime Percentage measurements exclude downtime resulting directly or indirectly from any Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusion (defined below)." https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/
  - Johnny555 11y ago
    That's a regional outage, they provide no SLA for individual instances: Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusions... (v) that result from failures of individual instances or volumes not attributable to Region Unavailability Presumably if you're using a cloud hosted in people's basements, if someone's basement server dies, you'd just pick one from someone else's basement, so this model could provide better availability than AWS.
ant6n 11y ago
Like Amazon spot instances. People follow habits, so you can make uptime predictions.

Razengan 11y ago

Why not just move forward to realizing some sort of distributed/decentralized internet? Something like a combination of Freenet, TOR, BOINC, blockchain etc. technologies, using the current "legacy" internet as a backbone, where anyone can voluntarily offer their computing and storage resources to the network at varying levels of participation. Say you could offer your laptop as a simple discovery/directory node to simply help others connect and find stuff, and your desktop as either a static-content serving node or as a computation node that can host distributed applications, like SETI@home or web apps like Facebook. Maybe even reward cryptocurrency to those who offer the most resources.

manav 11y ago
There is Gridcoin which is a cryptocurrency that rewards for BOINC projects. I wouldn't be surprised if certain services became more centralized, offloading computing to the cloud. Consumer grade devices would become thin clients (like back in the day). NVIDIA has hinted in this direction, I can remember something about GaaS (Gaming as a Service).

dsl 11y ago

Various companies have tried this. What you end up with is 99% of your workforce is compromised machines, and law enforcement at your door every other day asking where checks are being mailed.