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My personal opinion a central reason for the fading of volunteer-based distributed scientific computing (such as the mentioned SETI@home) is the rise of laptops

My personal opinion a central reason for the fading of volunteer-based distributed scientific computing (such as the mentioned SETI@home) is the rise of laptops. Normal desktop PCs (in particular the ones that one builds by oneself for gaming) have sufficient cooling capacity that it is causes no serious issue to let them run to help some interesting science projects while you are at work. If you use a laptop, this is much more inconvenient since the cooling design of laptops is nearly always a compromise, and they are typically rather not built to run many hours of "numbercrunching" on most days for months. EDIT: the article also at least as a sideline mentions this fact: "Making matters worse, fewer people have this hardware due to the general shift from desktop computers to laptops."

toomuchtodo 3y ago
When I was a wee lad in my parents' basement with bread racks full of old x86 boxes cranking away on Distributed.net's [1] RSA cracking projects, distributed computing was in fashion because there was a lot of spare compute globally. As you mentioned, a lot of hardware has shifted to laptops. That is one part of the bifurcation. The other part is the mass movement to cloud infra, where there is much less idle compute available. Distributed computing was arbing excess idle compute at scale, which has seen a decline due to the factors mentioned. The EFF DES cracker was also pretty cool in a hybrid distributed computing/custom ASIC fashion [2] [3] (which partnered with distributed.net to chew through key space for RSA Security's DES Challenge III after having accomplished a brute force challenge exclusively). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker [3] https://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec https://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > That is one part of the bifurcation. The other part is the mass movement to cloud infra, where there is much less "spare compute" available. What was moved to cloud infrastructure are rather servers that were on-premise in the company's data center in the past. These on-premise servers did never really have any "spare capacity" that would have been allowed to be used for such scientific distrubuted computing projects.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    There were some folks contributing to distributed.net that had entire corporate server fleets contributing. It was a different time. I don't know if the leaderboard is still available or archived, same with mailing list and IRC where people were admitting to it. Similarly, people in an IT admin capacity might push out a background process (distributed.net had a binary that would run as a service with no user interface exposed) to fleets of corp desktops with their identifier in the config for leaderboard purposes. https://www.distributed.net/Policy https://www.distributed.net/Policy ("distributed.net does not condone the unauthorized use of its software on any computer system. You may not run any distributed.net software on a system unless you own the system or have received permission from the owner to run distributed.net software. Running the client on a machine without authorization will result in your removal from the project and will disqualify you from winning.") [My note: This exists because of the above mentioned naughty behavior] I should go digging for those EFnet IRC logs.
  - bdhcuidbebe 3y ago
    People got fired for running distributed.net on company/school infra more than once.
s0rce 3y ago
I think even with desktops is that they consume much less power, generate less heat and make less noise (fans run slower) when idle vs. operating at max power on distributed computing tasks. This wasn't historically the case.
formerly_proven 3y ago
Electricity prices, too. It'd cost me upwards of a 100 bucks per month to contribute to one of the @home projects. Not exactly pocket change. It's also inherently inefficient, iirc every work package is dispatched to several clients and the majority result is used.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

When I was a wee lad in my parents' basement with bread racks full of old x86 boxes cranking away on Distributed.net's [1] RSA cracking projects, distributed computing was in fashion because there was a lot of spare compute globally. As you mentioned, a lot of hardware has shifted to laptops. That is one part of the bifurcation. The other part is the mass movement to cloud infra, where there is much less idle compute available. Distributed computing was arbing excess idle compute at scale, which has seen a decline due to the factors mentioned. The EFF DES cracker was also pretty cool in a hybrid distributed computing/custom ASIC fashion [2] [3] (which partnered with distributed.net to chew through key space for RSA Security's DES Challenge III after having accomplished a brute force challenge exclusively). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker [3] https://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec https://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> That is one part of the bifurcation. The other part is the mass movement to cloud infra, where there is much less "spare compute" available. What was moved to cloud infrastructure are rather servers that were on-premise in the company's data center in the past. These on-premise servers did never really have any "spare capacity" that would have been allowed to be used for such scientific distrubuted computing projects.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  There were some folks contributing to distributed.net that had entire corporate server fleets contributing. It was a different time. I don't know if the leaderboard is still available or archived, same with mailing list and IRC where people were admitting to it. Similarly, people in an IT admin capacity might push out a background process (distributed.net had a binary that would run as a service with no user interface exposed) to fleets of corp desktops with their identifier in the config for leaderboard purposes. https://www.distributed.net/Policy https://www.distributed.net/Policy ("distributed.net does not condone the unauthorized use of its software on any computer system. You may not run any distributed.net software on a system unless you own the system or have received permission from the owner to run distributed.net software. Running the client on a machine without authorization will result in your removal from the project and will disqualify you from winning.") [My note: This exists because of the above mentioned naughty behavior] I should go digging for those EFnet IRC logs.
- bdhcuidbebe 3y ago
  People got fired for running distributed.net on company/school infra more than once.

s0rce 3y ago

I think even with desktops is that they consume much less power, generate less heat and make less noise (fans run slower) when idle vs. operating at max power on distributed computing tasks. This wasn't historically the case.

formerly_proven 3y ago

Electricity prices, too. It'd cost me upwards of a 100 bucks per month to contribute to one of the @home projects. Not exactly pocket change. It's also inherently inefficient, iirc every work package is dispatched to several clients and the majority result is used.