[Beowulf] Is Crowd Computing the Next Big Thing?

[William Johnson]

The technology for this type of distributed computing already has a large
community.
The BOINC Project (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) has
existed since 2002 and allows people to donate idle computing time to large
science and math computation projects.
They have clients to run on many types of platforms with a system of job
servers that can benchmark and customize workloads to the device/processors
(CPUs/GPUs) participating. Clients that exist to participate already range
from desktops and tablets to game systems like PS3, abstracting
calculations from platforms and processors, and sometimes available to run
in virtual box on a machine to keep them separate.
It could be nice to earn a return on this type of computation, current
projects through BOINC are largely in the realm of university research and
all participant volunteer their resources. I'm not sure what types of
commercial work loads might be willing to pay for this type of computing
resource. It does seem to limit types of jobs to data sets that can be
batch divided into parallel units, to work large problem spaces. That
brings to mind more research uses, and not many commercial uses.
Perhaps computational modeling for research and development (like failure
testing several potential models), or analysis of geological mining survey
data, or process flow analysis for large manufacturing and distribution
systems. But it makes me think most of marketing analysis with the current
focus in big data projects from corporate environments I see in articles
and instructional materials.



On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 3:19 PM Chuck Petras <Chuck_Petras at selinc.com>
wrote:

> Seen the below where a company wants to rent your smartphone as a cloud
> computing resource. From a few years ago there was a company making space
> heaters that contained servers to compute and heat your house.
>
>
>
> Are there any classes of problems that would be monitizeable in a grid
> computing environment to make those efforts financially viable?
>
>
>
> Is Crowd Computing the Next Big Thing?
>
> https://www.eejournal.com/article/is-crowd-computing-the-next-big-thing/
>
>
>
> Heating houses with 'nerd power'
>
> https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32816775#
> <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32816775>
>
>
>
> Chuck Petras, PE**
>
> Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc
>
> Pullman, WA  99163  USA
>
> http://www.selinc.com
>
>
>
> SEL Synchrophasors - A New View of the Power System <
> http://synchrophasor.selinc.com>
>
>
>
> Making Electric Power Safer, More Reliable, and More Economical (R)
>
>
>
> ** Registered in Oregon.
>
>
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