4 ms·

What happens when the contributor abruptly cuts out?

by jasonzemos 14y ago

infinii 14y ago
I'm also curious, what happens if all your host contributors decided to stop?
- deno 14y ago
  Have fallback to EC2 if GridSpot can’t provide capacity you need at the moment. The same is true for any other cloud service, actually. E.g. Amazon was having problems issuing new instances in some regions following the most recent power outage. In theory you should try falling back to other regions/other clouds. It remains to be seen how much of a problem this will be in practice.
deno 14y ago
Same thing as with Spot Instances on Amazon. Save your work often, reschedule eagerly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=player_embedded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=play...
- jasonzemos 14y ago
  Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online for all but a few minutes of each year. Transient machines spread over the internet on home or office PC's /do not/ have the same operational parameter. At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational power from home/office PC's? This seems entirely unclear based on the reactions of this thread and the mostly ambiguous stuff written on their website. If they are sourcing computational power SETI@home style my question remains, and I encourage it to be upvoted and answered on such a technically competent site such as this. Marketing hype is cool, but I'm still an engineer when it comes to making choices.
  - deno 14y ago
    > Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online for all but a few minutes of each year. Spot instances can be killed any time if your bid is too low. This will, of course, happen less often at Amazon, but the principle is the same. You must also be significantly more proactive about unreliable performance and poor security. But this may be worth it sometimes. > At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational power from home/office PC's? They’re computational power scavengers :) Seems to be desktop PCs for now. Maybe in the future it would also make sense to also utilise smartphones plugged into a charger? I hope they will be successful, because unreliable and cheap computational power is a pretty cool resource, despite all of its shortcomings.

What happens when the contributor abruptly cuts out?

infinii 14y ago

I'm also curious, what happens if all your host contributors decided to stop?

deno 14y ago
Have fallback to EC2 if GridSpot can’t provide capacity you need at the moment. The same is true for any other cloud service, actually. E.g. Amazon was having problems issuing new instances in some regions following the most recent power outage. In theory you should try falling back to other regions/other clouds. It remains to be seen how much of a problem this will be in practice.

deno 14y ago

Same thing as with Spot Instances on Amazon. Save your work often, reschedule eagerly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=player_embedded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=play...

jasonzemos 14y ago
Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online for all but a few minutes of each year. Transient machines spread over the internet on home or office PC's /do not/ have the same operational parameter. At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational power from home/office PC's? This seems entirely unclear based on the reactions of this thread and the mostly ambiguous stuff written on their website. If they are sourcing computational power SETI@home style my question remains, and I encourage it to be upvoted and answered on such a technically competent site such as this. Marketing hype is cool, but I'm still an engineer when it comes to making choices.
- deno 14y ago
  > Yes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online for all but a few minutes of each year. Spot instances can be killed any time if your bid is too low. This will, of course, happen less often at Amazon, but the principle is the same. You must also be significantly more proactive about unreliable performance and poor security. But this may be worth it sometimes. > At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational power from home/office PC's? They’re computational power scavengers :) Seems to be desktop PCs for now. Maybe in the future it would also make sense to also utilise smartphones plugged into a charger? I hope they will be successful, because unreliable and cheap computational power is a pretty cool resource, despite all of its shortcomings.