Comment by grandrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grandrew | Hacker News Reader

Hi! My name is Andrew and I want to introduce you a piece of junk I scratched in a couple of weeks - a CPU-ridesharing service Junk.Systems

I’ve had a few projects lately that require extremely cheap computation without any need for reliability or security - I needed just raw computation, and my demand is pretty constant.

So I calculated that I can build computing farm from used hardware and operate it profitably for the price 10 times lower than google’s preemptible machine for my projects. But building a computer farm yourself is not in trend nowadays, right? So I thought of uberizing the CPU sharing by just providing a non-privileged login to linux machines with no guarantee. If the machine gets screwed up for any reason - no prob, just reboot/reinstall/whatever. According to my calculations with current price a $10k farm will earn about $1000 in bitcoins a month so that may even be a kind of business. If the whole idea works, or course. At least, if somebody will use the computations - you can get a “free” heating source from your junk :)

I’m thinking of making the whole thing work entirely on smart contracts for the best transparency and survivability of the project - as I believe that cheap computation is the key to prosperity of the Humanity.

Please let me know what you think about this stuff and I am open for ideas and any type of collaboration, Thanks!

This is a cool idea. The price as listed is "cheap", but for the feature set, it's not really that cheap. It's half the cost of a digitalocean droplet with no security and possible surge pricing.

I think it's a fantastic idea and the implementation here seems easy to use, but needs to be significantly cheaper.

cjsaylor, thank you for your feedback! Yes the price is not so low I just had to have some figures to start with.

But as you may know - the $5 machine you are referencing here is not suitable for any meaningful work as you will have about 300MB of RAM after you boot it for your use - and this is about the amount or RAM you will need just for your framework to load up. So you should basically compare it with the $10 or $20 machine. Also you should take into account that the price here is the actual CPU-time - while DigitalOcean charges you the wall-hour - so I estimate the price like 5x-10x lower depending on your task.

But yes I know where to move from here - for example switching to accounting in GigaFLOPS-hour rather than machine time to allow usage of power efficient laptops for example (old laptops are usually slower but are still very energy efficient) and also for the owners of faster hardware to benefit

The absence of any authentication on both sides is arguably a disadvantage though. You may choose to compute anonymously for privacy related reasons and Junk.Systems is the only platform that allows you to do so AFAIK.

Fair points. I guess it wasn't super clear from the pricing example. I think, as you say, expressing the price per CPU time rather than wall clock time is what would better sell me on it.

I could actually see a pretty good use case for academic computing (think SETI at home, or the genome project) to where they could get cheaper access to CPU.

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