reliability—obviously, the startup would have to earn the reputation for reliability, but there’s nothing inherently stopping it.
etc—AWS is a beast, relatively speaking, and this offers a lot of smaller PCs for a short amount of time. I can’t really think of a reason where that would be needed for computing, but as network relays it would be very useful. You could create your own custom Tor and deploy it on demand.
It would be like a competitor to AWS. Instead of renting hardware from Amazon, you are renting it from personal computers.
Amazon isn’t cheap, especially for higher performance computing, and especially if you want to use gpus—e.g. to train deep neural networks. It currently makes more sense to buy your own hardware. But a lot of people have GPUs just sitting around, and they could make a few bucks and help science, by renting them out. You could possibly even pay back the cost of the GPU at the current market rates.
I don’t see how this competes with AWS on cost / reliability / etc. on the demand-side. On the supply side, consider cloud server racks as home heating devices.
cost—you pay in your own CPU cycles/bandwidth.
reliability—obviously, the startup would have to earn the reputation for reliability, but there’s nothing inherently stopping it.
etc—AWS is a beast, relatively speaking, and this offers a lot of smaller PCs for a short amount of time. I can’t really think of a reason where that would be needed for computing, but as network relays it would be very useful. You could create your own custom Tor and deploy it on demand.
It would be like a competitor to AWS. Instead of renting hardware from Amazon, you are renting it from personal computers.
Amazon isn’t cheap, especially for higher performance computing, and especially if you want to use gpus—e.g. to train deep neural networks. It currently makes more sense to buy your own hardware. But a lot of people have GPUs just sitting around, and they could make a few bucks and help science, by renting them out. You could possibly even pay back the cost of the GPU at the current market rates.