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So this sounds like BOINC but specifically for language neural nets? It's a very interesting concept, and I quite like the idea of a public, open compute cloud

So this sounds like BOINC but specifically for language neural nets? It's a very interesting concept, and I quite like the idea of a public, open compute cloud. I'd like to see more detail on security: if I'm going to donate time on my personal machine, I'd like some assurance that the workload is properly sandboxed and can't reasonably access my network or data. Mostly out of interest, what's the advantage to this over just using the existing BOINC network? I've been running BOINC on and off since the dialup days, it's an extremely mature platform with all kinds of workload capabilities.

borzunov 4y ago
During the training, participants only exchange tensors (embeddings, gradients) and never send code to each other. No other peer can execute arbitrary code on your computer - they can only request you to run one of pre-defined BLOOM layers. You can further isolate the Petals server from your machine by running it a Docker container (see the command in the repo). A client needs to communicate with multiple servers in a specific way to run the model, I'm not sure our communication model can be implemented with BOINC.