[Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: Is Crowd Computing the Next Big Thing?

[Lux, Jim (US 337K)]

We had an interesting discussion a few years ago at JPL about the issues surrounding running background tasks like Seti at Home on desktop computers  – Since the government buys the computers and pays for the electricity, is this a “legal or appropriate use of government resources” – albeit one that would be very difficult to assign a specific value to.  There are also a host of security questions that come from such things.



From: Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org> on behalf of William Johnson <meatheadmerlin at gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2019 at 7:24 PM
To: Chuck Petras <Chuck_Petras at selinc.com>, "beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Beowulf] Is Crowd Computing the Next Big Thing?


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<mailto: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.

_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:Beowulf at beowulf.org> sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20191127/69bec0c8/attachment.html>