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I have always been under the impression that there will eventually be a way to distribute ML projects across many personal computers (like the Folding@home or S
by mhuffman 4y ago
I have always been under the impression that there will eventually be a way to distribute ML projects across many personal computers (like the Folding@home or SETI@home) that could give even Google a run for their money! A few hundred million personal computers is a lot of processing!
- dontwearitout 4y agoOne issue with this is that many ML tasks are more memory bandwidth bound than compute bound. A forward pass through a neural network is a bunch of simple operations on gigabytes of data, whereas with protein folding there's a much higher ratio of compute to data.
- londons_explore 4y agoSETI@home had 90,000 users at its peak. Even assuming all these users have the most powerful Macbook, and are happy to run it 24/7, the whole fleet still doesn't equal just one of Googles pods. And googles pods have microsecond latency terabit interconnects, while a fleet of macbooks would have hundreds of milliseconds of latency and low bandwidth... And Google has many pods... I'm afraid even a massive team of home users will never beat companies with dedicated hardware.
- mhuffman 4y ago>SETI@home had 90,000 users at its peak. Even assuming all these users have the most powerful Macbook, and are happy to run it 24/7, the whole fleet still doesn't equal just one of Googles pods. Well ... SETI@home wasn't trying to create ML boobs for anime waifus! ... I suspect the army of young guys that want to do that would dwarf any other distributed service including bitcoin!