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Ask HN: Do you have a lot of idle hardware?

1 points by Patrick_Devine ↗ HN
Hey guys,

I'm trying to figure out if a lot of people have extra machines, either server grade stuff, or even desktop gaming rigs, lying around not being used. We've figured a way of building a cloud out of machines which can be parked anywhere, and I'm wondering if there actually is a reasonable amount of supply out there.

I know when I was working for a large Fortune 100 firm we often had piles of machines sitting in our datacenter not doing anything, but I'm not sure if that's common or not.

3 comments

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akassover
Can you be a little more specific about the scope of who "you" is? Startups, small businesses, freelancers, etc. I can answer this question, but I'm not sure I'd be polluting your data or not.
Patrick_Devine
I'm actually curious about anyone/everyone. My supposition is that there is a lot of dormant compute out there, and all of it is useful, although for different purposes. The biggest problem is that it's all locked up with no way of connecting it to a useful workload. It just seems like a colossal waste.

My guess is there is a lot of people with desktop/gaming machines which are powered off 20+ hours of the day. For startups/freelancers, I know I've got three or four machines which are powered off not doing anything other than depreciating.

akassover
My company maintains no hardware (everything is "in the cloud"). No server grade stuff or gaming rigs here - I did a purge of some desktop PCs over the summer.

The closest thing I have is an xbox 360 in a closet. I've got a 4 year old macbook pro in a drawer that I keep as a cold spare, a 3 year old macbook air that gets used about 4 hours a month, and a 2 month old macbook pro that is my bread-and-butter machine.

However, I do know people with basements full of hardware.