Ask HN: Would you use a free distributed computing SaaS?

2 points·fratlas··4 comments

Hi HN, I'm currently building a "little" distributed computing system, it's a little different from the norm. It runs off javascript, so any jobs would have to be submitted in JS. I'm looking to do heavy load testing, so it would be completely free. Is there a use case for this system/would you use it?

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I always had this idea of a distributed search engine that uses free CPU time and bandwidth on client machines for crawling and indexing. The code could either be distributed by <script> tags or as browser plugins

The problem is however not so much if it's technically feasible but why users should contribute their CPU time and bandwidth in the first place (particularly on mobile where both are scarce).

I suppose enterprise environments might be more amenable to such a system than consumer applications, particularly because most office PCs don't use most of their CPU time anyway. The question is what exactly to do with distributed computing capabilities in such environments.

I think YaCy[1] is similar to what you describe.

[1] http://yacy.net/en/index.html

Yes, pretty much. This never took off though, to a large part because the UX sucked and the search results used to be terrible. It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem: The search results get better with more users but you can only hope to acquire users if the results are any good right off the bat.

I depends on what would such service do for me. How "different" it is?

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