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Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by ant6n on Thursday March 31, 2016 @06:52PM (#11401230)
Somebody should make a startup that allows people to sell access to their computers by the minute. Like spot instances in the cloud ... in people's basements. The true sharing economy.
Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by Razengan on Thursday March 31, 2016 @09:12PM (#11401872)
Why not just move forward to realizing some sort of distributed/decentralized internet?

Something like a combination of Freenet, TOR, BOINC, blockchain etc. technologies, using the current "legacy" internet as a backbone, where anyone can voluntarily offer their computing and storage resources to the network at varying levels of participation.

Say you could offer your laptop as a simple discovery/directory node to simply help others connect and find stuff, and your desktop as either a static-content serving node or as a computation node that can host distributed applications, like SETI@home or web apps like Facebook.

Maybe even reward cryptocurrency to those who offer the most resources.

Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by manav on Thursday March 31, 2016 @11:14PM (#11402310)
There is Gridcoin which is a cryptocurrency that rewards for BOINC projects.

I wouldn't be surprised if certain services became more centralized, offloading computing to the cloud. Consumer grade devices would become thin clients (like back in the day). NVIDIA has hinted in this direction, I can remember something about GaaS (Gaming as a Service).

Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by dsl on Friday April 01, 2016 @12:40AM (#11402680)
Various companies have tried this. What you end up with is 99% of your workforce is compromised machines, and law enforcement at your door every other day asking where checks are being mailed.
Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by eximius on Thursday March 31, 2016 @07:30PM (#11401410)
That sounds like a nightmare. You'd have zero uptime guarantees!
Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by odonnellryan on Thursday March 31, 2016 @10:40PM (#11402182)
Would you?

What if you limited people to writing in a domain specific language: one that ran distributed on this infrastructure? How would that make it different than folding at home, for example?

Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by ant6n on Friday April 01, 2016 @12:35AM (#11402648)
Like Amazon spot instances. People follow habits, so you can make uptime predictions.
Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by Johnny555 on Thursday March 31, 2016 @11:32PM (#11402371)
Does Amazon have any instance uptime guarantees?
Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by joombaga on Friday April 01, 2016 @12:55AM (#11402737)
Yes, >99.95% Monthly Uptime Percentage.

"“Monthly Uptime Percentage” is calculated by subtracting from 100% the percentage of minutes during the month in which Amazon EC2 or Amazon EBS, as applicable, was in the state of “Region Unavailable.” Monthly Uptime Percentage measurements exclude downtime resulting directly or indirectly from any Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusion (defined below)."

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/

Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by Johnny555 on Friday April 01, 2016 @03:46PM (#11407949)
That's a regional outage, they provide no SLA for individual instances:

Amazon EC2 SLA Exclusions... (v) that result from failures of individual instances or volumes not attributable to Region Unavailability

Presumably if you're using a cloud hosted in people's basements, if someone's basement server dies, you'd just pick one from someone else's basement, so this model could provide better availability than AWS.

Re:Combine Multiple AWS Instances into a 16-GPU Monster Machine by manav on Thursday March 31, 2016 @07:01PM (#11401271)
IO is the bottleneck there for most applications, but there are some massively distributed grid computing projects that run on BOINC like Seti@HOME.