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It's really not about the platform being a "buyer of last resort" of the unused capacity. Think about the narrow band of values you need for that to work. Googl
by syllogism 10y ago
It's really not about the platform being a "buyer of last resort" of the unused capacity. Think about the narrow band of values you need for that to work. Google must value these compute jobs highly enough to have them offset the unused capacity...But they can't value them so highly that they're worth buying hardware to make sure they run. And this has to remain true, even as the hardware gets much cheaper?
Here's how I think AWS and GCE work...
Imagine you buy some hardware. You have n=1 users, and so the variance on your compute needs is very high. You buy for peak use, so your median utilisation is low.
Now imagine you have n=10,000,000 users. Again, you stock for peak use...But the variance is now much much lower. Your median utilisation is now much better.
- dekhn 10y agoI built a system at google called Exacycle which used idle cycles for computation. You can think of my system as the user of last resort. We ran MD simulations, drug docking, and ray tracing simulations of the LSST telescope (along with fundamental mathematical problems), then published the results from this for free. The economics of idle cycles in a large production environment aren't trivial to analyze, and anybody outside of Google speculating is likely to make a mistake.
- manigandham 10y agoIsnt this what folding@home and similar services have been doing for decades now?
- dekhn 10y agoThat's correct. in fact, we were the largest (in terms of total simulation seconds produced) provider of resources to Folding@Home and worked with Vijay Pande closely on this effort.