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This could also be a fertile pasture for distributed computing on the fly. Suppose you have a website that attracts 1k visitors per day on chrome, how many MIPS
by jmpe 13y ago
This could also be a fertile pasture for distributed computing on the fly. Suppose you have a website that attracts 1k visitors per day on chrome, how many MIPS could you harvest? Could you let them mine bitcoins or fold proteins in the background without attracting attention?
- eliben 13y agoHow is this different from existing client-side JavaScript code? PNaCl is significantly faster than JS, but conceptually it's similar - you can run code on the user's machine.
- jmpe 13y agoThe "significantly faster" is your answer. A 10 second visit on JS vs PNaCl is a whole new game. Edit: to elaborate: do a simple simulated annealing on a 200x200 array in JS - it's measured in seconds on my laptop. I wrote a program in JS that did this (image segmentation, fg/bg seperation for recognition) and abandoned it because of speed issues.
- azakai 13y agoJS should not be that slow in my experience. Do you still have the code to your benchmark somewhere? Perhaps you ran into a performance bug that we can file for the relevant browser(s).
- jmpe 13y agoI have it somewhere, also still have that laptop. It wasn't a benchmark but a poc for an algorithm. I did some serious optimization when I wrote it. There was a "best practices" for V8 that shedded some light on the background of JS variable allocation, I followed it and got a serious boost. Also did lookup tables instead of runtime math with exp/log functions. But in the end: hit several worst case images that took more than 12s, which was a gap that couldn't further be reduced through optimization. But you're absolutely right, I should redo it in PNaCl.
- eliben 13y agoAs azakai said, real benchmarks run by 3rd parties are great and very welcome. They can go a far way for improving all involved platforms and thus the web in general.
- jmpe 13y agoI'll allocate some time for it. Where should I submit?
- adrianmalacoda 13y agoI sure hope this doesn't become a thing, and if it does, that existing ad blocking and/or anti-malware tools pick it up and warn the user against it. When you start appropriating other peoples' computers for your own purposes, secretly, without their approval, that's called a bot net.
- jmpe 13y agoyeah, but think of the pro: "you can help pay for this website by pressing this button and leaving this window open for an hour". You could help SETI by just visiting a URL. By fertile pasture I mean that both malevolent and benevolent communities will support this. This could see a lot of optimization if open sourced (is it?).
- adrianmalacoda 13y agoIf it's voluntary on the user's part, then I'd be all for it. I was more concerned about the "in the background without attracting attention" part, which implies that it is done behind the user's back. I could see users opting into distributed computing tasks if given the choice.
- egeozcan 13y agoBandwidth may be a problem then. I mean, your gains in mining would be seriously hurt by the bandwidth costs. Also, if more people start mining this way, there will be more competition and your earnings will decline. There's also the case of some users maliciously feeding you false results. So you'll have to introduce redundancy to the system (I'm not sure if you get punished for false results apart from simply not getting paid though).