The slab and the permacomputer

Re:The slab and the permacomputer by brundolf on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @07:52PM (#29007959)

Maybe this exists, but what would a non-blockchain "distributed cloud" look like? Bittorrent, but for compute instead of just storage/transfer. You might need some kind of central authority orchestrating it all, almost certainly to manage payments at least. I'm just wondering how the world's consumer computers stand up against megacorp data-centers when you mash them all together. Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow.

I'm imagining an individual or org could download a daemon, start it up on a spare machine (or a workstation with spare cycles!) and just get paid over time as people run lambdas/workers on their hardware. Of course you'd need some really intense sandboxing, but that seems like it could be solvable. Or maybe it isn't, and that's the reason this doesn't exist.

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Re:The slab and the permacomputer by machinerychorus on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @11:35PM (#29009265)

> Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow.

Isn't this essentially what browser+js does? you download someones code and execute it locally. Reminds me of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/1367/

however, after typing that out I think I see what you really meant: if I'm running something compute intense, why can't I just borrow cpu from a couple neighbors instead of going all the way to the datacenter?

Sandboxing would be important, but it would also be pretty hard to build applications that really take advantage of this model. concurrency on one machine is hard enough!

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Re:The slab and the permacomputer by brundolf on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @12:00AM (#29009407)

Containers, and especially lambdas, have made the units of the cloud more and more granular. I don't think you'd have to think about concurrency any more than you already do

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