So the customer pays Gridspot and Gridspot does not pay anything to the person whose computer is actually doing the work? Great business model if you can make it work.
The difference is that most Skype users don't even know they are carrying traffic for the network. The client silently punches a whole in their router and makes itself a pain to close (for example by reconfiguring what the red X does) without ever explaining why it wants to keep running so badly.
My understanding is that after MSFT acquisition, they don't use their customer devices as supernodes anymore [1]. For "silent hole punching" with UPnP, that is very much business as usual for any VoIP application as well as other applications, such as Windows' Teredo IPv6 thingy.
Presumably you are using the results of the distributed system's work for something. Can you trust those results from people who can't keep a web server alive?
I'm not sure what you mean by "can't keep a web server alive" but I think the answer to your question is to run your computations on multiple instances at once to validate your results.
Give them some break. Probably they are still building it. Frequently people post to HN before things are ready so that friends can review it and post feedback.
In the bigger picture, there are a whole lot of interesting things that would need to be built to allow for non-batch processing on a cloud like this... a smart web proxy / front-end that could cope when your instances go down being #1 on the list.
"SETI but paid" is a very tempting idea, but we could never get the back of the envelope math to work out to the point where we could pay the contributors anything compelling (e.g., enough to offset their power cost).
I guess you can get a few people to sign-up for fun, but we could never come up with a reason other than serendipity that would make people donate their CPU time for us to resell. I'll be interested to see how/if they respond to this challenge, or if there's something I'm not seeing that makes this point moot.
This is great - it looks to have some very sensible answers to many of the questions of how a distributed cloud would work.
The thing that excites me most about a distributed cloud is that it could turn the notion of elastic computing on its head. You can buy your peak compute requirement, and sell back the surplus. So you can get elastic computing not by re-engineering your own systems, but by selling excess capacity to those whose workloads are a good match.
How do they handle security? If the software they're using to virtualize these instances is exploitable, then you could break into the host machine and do whatever you like with it.
I agree, theres a level of trust when you use hosting providers like Amazon and heroku. With this, there's no way i'd do anything remotely sensitive with one of these boxes.
From [1] - "Our users volunteer their idle compute resources because they want to be part of something valuable to the world. We believe that this is a motivator far more powerful than paying people a small amount of money every month.".
Yeah, I don't think that is going to work, especially because you are for-profit organization not SETI
There's a surprising behavioral economics result that says people will do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money. A check in the mail for a dollar or two every month isn't as compelling as being part of a group effort.
And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not people want this type of compute.
hah, doh. Thought the article linked to the homepage, still think they should have a link from the /compute/ page, people might be interested in both using and being used for this.
Wow, really, six figures? 250 results for "gridspot.com" on google, and yet you have 100000+ computers running this software?
I want to hire you! I'll pay you 10 figures/month!
This comment is quite rude, but I still haven't seen an answer for this yet. How did you get all these users to donate their computers even though nobody seems to have heard of you yet? Something seems fishy, and I wish you'd answer.
Fake it till you make it? I don't know for sure, but could they be subsidising the launch by running instances on EC2? ... When they get enough hosts signed up, switch over to their distributed model, or even run a hybrid combination to handle demand spikes.
Google shows results for "gridspot.exe" on ID-this-process sites dating from mid-March. So it's out there and has been for a few months. The question is whose machines it's running on.
Your "giving back" paragraph about what motivates your users is completely dishonest. You know your users are clueless and installed your client because it was bundled with an application they actually wanted to use.
Well, people won't do things for free, if someone takes the money for their effort. What is the number of contributors who know exactly what's going on?
I can think of precisely zero ethical ways you could already have more than 100k machines participating. An explanation from you would be very, very nice to see.
An obvious way to do this is how consumers can upload solar power to the grid, and it comes off their bill.
With enough people involved, the compute version of this could be self-sustaining, and the infrastructure guys just take a wee percentage. They are unlikely to be replaced by purely free infrastructure, because money is involved (even if in the form of credits). If there was a shortage at particular time, some people might supply that themselves, for extra cash. Distributed compute supply = local compute supply, with latency advantages.
People install their program, contribute the power of their computers for free and Gridspot takes money.
Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone contribute their computer resource for other people to make money from that? I would rather, I don't know, mine bitcoins or set up a Tor proxy.
There are many applications for this - including fighting DDOS attacks. There are still huge technical challenges with that particular application, but as I understand it...the only way to fight a DDOS is to a) get bigger guns, or b) lie down and take your raping.
Having something like this, can (in theory) give you bigger guns.
Do you guys pay the people who have idle resources?
Or cheaply launching them. For a mere $100 you get 100,000 machines for an hour, that's more than enough to cause problems for a sad number of websites out there. Edit: Or not, given that all traffic goes through a centralized node.
Yeh....was about to say that I doubt that given the architecture. The difference is that there is a for-profit company that controls the nodes, so I doubt they would allow that. Completely different than a real botnet where the botnet owner controls everything.
Something else just occurred to me....by not paying users to get axs to their computers, it removes the business model headache of squabbling over revenue and violating ISP TOS. I believe it is against most TOS for most (if not all) ISPs for a consumer to resell their inet axs.
That was another consideration that I looked at two years ago - which makes the model not as attractive. Although, I imagine that the holy grail is actually reaching a place where users are making money from their inet connection - I am sure that will drive adoption at an increasing rate.
I don't know about 'legitimate', but I can think of plenty of specific ones. I say build it (just might want to incorporate it separately... possibly in Sweden..)
Increase the attack surface area. With anycast the nearest nodes to the attackers "sink" all of the traffic. The rest of the nodes continue to serve other customers with no I'll effect.
With this product you will have a very wide base of unicast addresses. Treat each node/address as disposable. Use fast failing health checks and an out of band control plane. As each node falls to attack remove it from your service discovery layer (DNS/http 302/etc). See "fast flux dns" for implementation ideas. The attacker will spend a disproportionate amount of resources (packets/s) attacking each of your disposable nodes. The majority of your "good" customers will continue to be served.
In a traditional tiered architecture the L3->L7 routing layer (LB/Proxy) is very expensive to scale vertically. Your data store & compute end are clustered behind these choke points. Remove/minimize shared state and you can have independent units of compute. Remove those L3->L7 choke points and you can get a wider & flatter L1->L3 network fabric. Besides increased durability you get more aggregate bandwidth per $.
We're about to launch a service that allows comparison of benchmarks from cloud providers (UnixBench/IO & BW), would love to run it on your plans to compare against Amazon etc.
This seems too good to be true, but it's working great for me!
With no credit card, I got an instance with 3 GB RAM running in less than 60 seconds. It costs $0.002 per hour.
One glitch: Both the UI and the API say there are 2 instances running, but they both have the same IP address and port. If there really are 2 instances, how do I ssh to the second one?
Ok!, the two instances you were seeing were duplicate listings of the same instance. That bug was introduced a few days ago by some database optimizations, and is now fixed! Thanks for reporting it.
The 1.56 core-hours is mostly from inst_KGN6tZdFgoeL2C9KPKBsNA which has four physical cpus and has been running for almost an hour at this point.
You are of course absolutely right! There was a bug (now fixed) that was causing only one cpu to show up in the VMs. All instances started after now should have the proper number of cpus visible.
(Note, the number of cpus might be higher than the number of physical cpus if the host cpu supports hyperthreading.)
How embarrassing (but fixed now). That was introduced when I added the ability to boot five instances without a credit card. Thanks for letting me know!
"Thus, we decided to only run computations when the outdoor temperature near the user is below a certain level (currently 16 degrees Celcius). When it's that cold outside, we assume that the computer's room is being heated anyway. All of the electricity used to do computations gets turned into heat, according to the laws of physics. So the heat generated by the computations displaces the need for heat generated by a heater, eliminating or minimizing the net elecricity usage."
Doesn't work in the USA. Natural gas heating in the US averages $10.80/thousand cubic feet ~= $10/gigajoule [1]. Electricity averages $0.1179/kWh ~= $33/gigajoule [1] -- more than three as expensive for raw heat. Natural gas heating is twice as common in US homes, with about 55.6 million vs. 28.4 million using electric resistance heating [2] -- not including 9.8 million electric heat pumps.
In the common case, you're displacing cheap gas heating with expensive electric resistance heating; the cost "savings" on heating is small. At 100W power consumption, you're spending 1.2 cents/hour on electricity, saving 0.4 cents/hour on gas, for a net loss of 0.8 cents/hour. Meanwhile your CPU is being sold for 0.1 - 0.3 cents/hour [3] -- far less than the electricity needed to run it, apparently (?).
Break-even is 0.2 cents/hour per core for a 4-core system that uses 100 watts. A full i7-3770K system with integrated graphics uses 102 watts under heavy load [1], and when each of its 4 cores sells for 0.2 cents/hour, that covers the 4*0.2 = 0.8 cents/hour difference from natural gas to electricity. 0.3 cents/hour covers the entire electricity usage, providing free heat.
There goes the 16G RAM, quad-proc machine I had sitting idle running Linux; I'm not going to reinstall the OS just to help someone else out with free CPU time.
I use pay-pal or debit card, if I actually buy something online. Credit-card culture isn't so great where I live, and I personally don't have one - hence the question.
I've also tried 'sudo shutdown now' and while it did shut down the OS, the site says they are still running and the times are still increasing. How will I know when they've actually stopped? Also +1 for an API to end instances, please.
Sorry if i missed but : Who are you ? Please put some information about "yourself" somewhere on your site. And if you can, please answer these questions on your page :
- What is your company name and legal type ?
- What is your location ?
- How can i contact to you ? No, support@gridspot.com doesn't count, put some landline numbers too.
- Who are your team members ?
And please don't use " Whois guard" ?
edit: Looks like, downvoting is easier than answering the questions. Seriously, can you explain to me : why do you trust some company which doesn't give any information about itself ?
No, it's Adam but you're right that he should write something about himself within the company website. In the meantime, you can see him answering feedback in the comments of this discussion. Here's one of them http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226286
Wouldn't work. As soon as you move the incentive to the world of financial norms people start wondering why they are bothering for a couple bucks a year.
They will get more people doing it to be part of a community if they can keep that community seeming "cool" in some way.
I work in the field too. These are exactly my thoughts on the matter, and I'm sorely disappointed with the comments in this thread hinting as such so far.
155 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] thread[1]: Ars Technica seems to confirm: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
"SETI but paid" is a very tempting idea, but we could never get the back of the envelope math to work out to the point where we could pay the contributors anything compelling (e.g., enough to offset their power cost).
I guess you can get a few people to sign-up for fun, but we could never come up with a reason other than serendipity that would make people donate their CPU time for us to resell. I'll be interested to see how/if they respond to this challenge, or if there's something I'm not seeing that makes this point moot.
If the service was really successful you could be giving out n * $100k prizes every month. Just treat it like the (much cheaper) server hosting bill.
The thing that excites me most about a distributed cloud is that it could turn the notion of elastic computing on its head. You can buy your peak compute requirement, and sell back the surplus. So you can get elastic computing not by re-engineering your own systems, but by selling excess capacity to those whose workloads are a good match.
Yeah, I don't think that is going to work, especially because you are for-profit organization not SETI
[1] - https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe
And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not people want this type of compute.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120329124823AA...
It does in bring into question whether or not gridspot.exe was installed nefariously.
With enough people involved, the compute version of this could be self-sustaining, and the infrastructure guys just take a wee percentage. They are unlikely to be replaced by purely free infrastructure, because money is involved (even if in the form of credits). If there was a shortage at particular time, some people might supply that themselves, for extra cash. Distributed compute supply = local compute supply, with latency advantages.
http://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/currentweatherusnational...
Looks like Russia is off the map as well. As is most of Europe, save for parts of the UK.
You're good in Sydney though!
People install their program, contribute the power of their computers for free and Gridspot takes money.
Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone contribute their computer resource for other people to make money from that? I would rather, I don't know, mine bitcoins or set up a Tor proxy.
There are many applications for this - including fighting DDOS attacks. There are still huge technical challenges with that particular application, but as I understand it...the only way to fight a DDOS is to a) get bigger guns, or b) lie down and take your raping.
Having something like this, can (in theory) give you bigger guns.
Do you guys pay the people who have idle resources?
Or cheaply launching them. For a mere $100 you get 100,000 machines for an hour, that's more than enough to cause problems for a sad number of websites out there. Edit: Or not, given that all traffic goes through a centralized node.
That was another consideration that I looked at two years ago - which makes the model not as attractive. Although, I imagine that the holy grail is actually reaching a place where users are making money from their inet connection - I am sure that will drive adoption at an increasing rate.
However:
"All network traffic is proxied through a central data center we maintain."
https://gridspot.com/compute/api_help
If there are specific, legitimate uses for a large number of IPs, for example fighting DDOS, then that might be something we should build!
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-horizon-victims-ddos.html
With this product you will have a very wide base of unicast addresses. Treat each node/address as disposable. Use fast failing health checks and an out of band control plane. As each node falls to attack remove it from your service discovery layer (DNS/http 302/etc). See "fast flux dns" for implementation ideas. The attacker will spend a disproportionate amount of resources (packets/s) attacking each of your disposable nodes. The majority of your "good" customers will continue to be served. In a traditional tiered architecture the L3->L7 routing layer (LB/Proxy) is very expensive to scale vertically. Your data store & compute end are clustered behind these choke points. Remove/minimize shared state and you can have independent units of compute. Remove those L3->L7 choke points and you can get a wider & flatter L1->L3 network fabric. Besides increased durability you get more aggregate bandwidth per $.
http://serverbear.com/benchmarks
With no credit card, I got an instance with 3 GB RAM running in less than 60 seconds. It costs $0.002 per hour.
One glitch: Both the UI and the API say there are 2 instances running, but they both have the same IP address and port. If there really are 2 instances, how do I ssh to the second one?
The 1.56 core-hours is mostly from inst_KGN6tZdFgoeL2C9KPKBsNA which has four physical cpus and has been running for almost an hour at this point.
Thanks so much for trying this out!!!
If `cat /proc/cpuinfo` or `top` only shows one CPU, I wouldn't expect to be charged for 4 of them.
(Note, the number of cpus might be higher than the number of physical cpus if the host cpu supports hyperthreading.)
The Add Credit Card link is pointing here:
http://localhost:8000/compute/change_card
https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe
Doesn't work in the USA. Natural gas heating in the US averages $10.80/thousand cubic feet ~= $10/gigajoule [1]. Electricity averages $0.1179/kWh ~= $33/gigajoule [1] -- more than three as expensive for raw heat. Natural gas heating is twice as common in US homes, with about 55.6 million vs. 28.4 million using electric resistance heating [2] -- not including 9.8 million electric heat pumps.
In the common case, you're displacing cheap gas heating with expensive electric resistance heating; the cost "savings" on heating is small. At 100W power consumption, you're spending 1.2 cents/hour on electricity, saving 0.4 cents/hour on gas, for a net loss of 0.8 cents/hour. Meanwhile your CPU is being sold for 0.1 - 0.3 cents/hour [3] -- far less than the electricity needed to run it, apparently (?).
[1] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/prices.cfm (residential retail prices, 2011)
[2] (.xls) http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/xls/HC6...
[3] https://gridspot.com/compute/
European costs for comparison:
[4] http://www.energy.eu/
[1] http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i73770K-Ivy-Bridge...
There goes the 16G RAM, quad-proc machine I had sitting idle running Linux; I'm not going to reinstall the OS just to help someone else out with free CPU time.
You can stop a running instance by shutting down the OS. If it's something people really want we can add an API/UI mechanism to do it.
> We have designed the Gridspot Software...
Sorry if i missed but : Who are you ? Please put some information about "yourself" somewhere on your site. And if you can, please answer these questions on your page :
- What is your company name and legal type ?
- What is your location ?
- How can i contact to you ? No, support@gridspot.com doesn't count, put some landline numbers too.
- Who are your team members ?
And please don't use " Whois guard" ?
edit: Looks like, downvoting is easier than answering the questions. Seriously, can you explain to me : why do you trust some company which doesn't give any information about itself ?
http://blog.adamsmith.cc/about-adam-smith.html
They will get more people doing it to be part of a community if they can keep that community seeming "cool" in some way.