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Comment by pyinstallwoes | Hacker News Reader

Swarm compute should be the norm for all compute - so much unused cpu across all the devices we collectively own.

I'd rather my CPU to be idle and not consome much power

It depends. There is a lot of devices with quite capable cpus that are mostly doing nothing.

I also prefer my phone to not be hot and constantly plugged in. Or for my ML workload to suddenly get slow because my partner drove the car out of range of the WiFi. Or to miss notifications because my watch's CPU was saturated.

Fair point. OTOH, something like a Tesla must have a lot of computing power that's just mostly idle when parked and charging at home.

That is unless Tesla is already using their idle cars as remote datacenters, crunching numbers to get better at self-driving.

This might not work for use cases where you need low latency, but for longer winded processing it would be amazing if possible.

For example, if I have a few servers, laptop (connected to power) as well as a desktop PC and they’re all connected to a fast local network, it’d be great to distribute the task of rendering a video or working with archive files across all of them.

Those are two precise examples that benefit from single core compute power, and are wholly unsuited to distributed computing…

Distributed rendering farms have existed for a while.

They render a single frame though. Admittedly, so does video rendering.

This exists: https://aihorde.net/

I haven’t tried it, and not the norm, but I agree it should be more common. We have a global supercomputer with higher latency, but still a supercomputer.

I might just still be too tired from just waking up, but I can’t for the life of me find any details on that site about what models are actually being served by the horde?

Go to https://aihorde.net/api/, scroll down to /v2/status/models, and click Try it out and then Execute. It's an enormous list and I think it can be dynamically updated, so that's probably why it isn't listed on the website.

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