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"how hard would it be to assemble a million people to contribute a fraction of their compute time?" The BOINC project's done it, they've seen 1million+ compute
by timf 18y ago
"how hard would it be to assemble a million people to contribute a fraction of their compute time?"
The BOINC project's done it, they've seen 1million+ computers. And they even have an installation barrier which is different than what you are suggesting (their software is robust and easy to install but you still have to do it).
One thing BOINC and BOINC projects do well is establish non-monetary incentives, whether it be competitions, fancy graphs, etc. That's something to solve, not sure enlisting just your social network (manually, with an URL) is going to be enough to cut it if you want thousands of participants (unless you are particularly "influential" I guess).
Or maybe this is something a legion of mechanical turkers would be interested in?
- timf 18y agoAnother thing BOINC does is make sure the work is backgrounded and interruptible. Given the propensity for heavy Javascript to lock up browsers (other than process-per-tab browsers like Chrome), I wonder how well this could be executed in terms of not ticking people off.
- hendler 18y agoIn 2001 when I was traveling in Asia, I installed Seti@home (now a Boinc project) on every computer I could in internet cafés. Google Gears is also pretty good way to do this your self since there's a DB and a background process - although full apps in the client changes the security model - as with google native client - http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/ http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/ Nice post. Oh, and I like the rainbow butts iconography. :)