Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

polymathwannabe

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

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.

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.

2Sherincall11y

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.

12

Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

12

12

12

Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

12

12