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There may be a market for this. I know several people who run various types of folding just to be able to brag about the performance they get, and love to show
by skolor 17y ago
There may be a market for this. I know several people who run various types of folding just to be able to brag about the performance they get, and love to show off their stats. Getting paid for it would just be icing on the cake.
Of course, the pricing structure would be difficult, as would setting up the infrastructure for it. My (uniformed, by-the-seat-of-my-pants) best guess would be that subverting the current folding method of jobs would be the best way to do it. Accept jobs, send out to client computers, clients get paid based off of how many they complete. The problem arises from: sandboxing the jobs, to make sure they can't steal client info, and making it relatively easy to program jobs, while still allowing users to do various things to increase their performance (like using GPUs and the like).
- fsniper 17y agoI second you. But this is something needing years and great amount of money to be good enough for everyday use. It may be a good start up project. But I'm not that determined to do this unfortunately.
- skolor 17y agoI am relatively sure it couldn't be done as a startup. The profit margins just aren't there. My back of the envelope math says that each Work Unit, which, based off my experience takes ~8 hours to finish, would go for ~$0.80 (assuming that EC2 does a comparable speed, which isn't guaranteed). In order to make a decent profit, you'd have to be paying the users <$0.20 per unit, or roughly $0.60 per day, per core. It doesn't seem like a good enough proposition, that will barely cover the increased power consumption. On the other hand, if an existing company branched out into this, something like Amazon and MTurk, I could see it working. A company which already has a user base, which has software installed on clients could leverage this as a "Oh yeah, here, we think this is cool, try it".