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I guess you wouldn't want to perform any mission critical computation on this type of system, unless you can verify the results you obtain using it are accurate

I guess you wouldn't want to perform any mission critical computation on this type of system, unless you can verify the results you obtain using it are accurate, as I can imagine its fairly easy for people to tamper with your data. But I imagine theres a number of types of tasks it would be really good for. I'm curious how the technique presented in "Reusable Garbled Circuits and Succinct Functional Encryption" https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/733.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/733.pdf could potentially be utilised in such a system. I'm assuming it currently isn't possible due to computation overhead?

throwaway7767 10y ago
I think the general use case for this is the same as for most crowdsourced computing projects - problems that are hard to solve but whose solutions are easy to verify.
- deutronium 10y ago
  Yeah, that'd definitely make sense. I still really like the idea.
sjayasinghe 10y ago
If the cost is not an issue you could run the same computation on multiple clients and verify that they all produce the same result.
- deutronium 10y ago
  Yeah, that seems to be how SETI does it
spassbold 10y ago
The general purpose computing it does is based on running Gridcoin, which rewards running BOINC projects, like SETI@home, WorldCommunityGrid or Rosetta@home. The work units are verified depending on the project by either: 1) checking if results make sense. There are for example many protein folding that simply cannot exist and this can easily be checked. 2) Sending the same task to several hosts and checking if the results are the same. If one host always produces different results than the other, it is probably cheating
Ameo 10y ago
Distributed computing is most useful for stuff that you can, well, distribute. A lot of BOINC projects do this by dividing work up into workunits. They send out a packet of data to crunch, the clients crunch it, and return the results. Many of these workunits are optimization problems without a clear solution and rely on algorithms using randomness, stuff like protein folding and bitcoin mining are examples of this. The nice thing about those is that you can send them out to as many clients as you want and just pick the best answer.

throwaway7767 10y ago

I think the general use case for this is the same as for most crowdsourced computing projects - problems that are hard to solve but whose solutions are easy to verify.

deutronium 10y ago
Yeah, that'd definitely make sense. I still really like the idea.

sjayasinghe 10y ago

If the cost is not an issue you could run the same computation on multiple clients and verify that they all produce the same result.

deutronium 10y ago
Yeah, that seems to be how SETI does it

spassbold 10y ago

The general purpose computing it does is based on running Gridcoin, which rewards running BOINC projects, like SETI@home, WorldCommunityGrid or Rosetta@home. The work units are verified depending on the project by either: 1) checking if results make sense. There are for example many protein folding that simply cannot exist and this can easily be checked. 2) Sending the same task to several hosts and checking if the results are the same. If one host always produces different results than the other, it is probably cheating

Ameo 10y ago

Distributed computing is most useful for stuff that you can, well, distribute. A lot of BOINC projects do this by dividing work up into workunits. They send out a packet of data to crunch, the clients crunch it, and return the results. Many of these workunits are optimization problems without a clear solution and rely on algorithms using randomness, stuff like protein folding and bitcoin mining are examples of this. The nice thing about those is that you can send them out to as many clients as you want and just pick the best answer.