clockcyckles as a form of currency ?

[boran]

well, this tought just occured me after reading an (? old ?) article about the spyware integrated into kazzaa using cockcycles from your machine for the "home company" to sell to other companies.

my toughts now are how managable would it be to have you sell your clockcycles to a company in exchange for services (such as MP3's) but then more regulated ... lets say u get $1 for every Ghz/hr (this shouldnt be measured in ghz because of IPC differences but this is just an example)

that way you can collect some money on some virtual account to buy songs with etc...

how does this sound to u, does it sound possible ?

thanks for any opinions ...

 

[jarsoffart]

I posted a question that I think is identical in the Distributed Computing forum and the response was that it is very plausible and many people would want it, but no company currently has such a program.

 

[Buddha Bart]

what your thinking of touches on what is known as "Grid Computing".

Right now its 99% buzzword and vaporware, but IBM has thrown some major cash at it, and generally a lot of people see it as the future of utility-based computing.

[edit] just realized i was in the HT forum, so here's something for those of you interested in a HT take on Grid.
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~raj/thesis/thesis.pdf[/edit]
bart

 

[Shalmanese]

There are a couple of fairly major problems ATM with this concept but nothing that wont be ironed out with more technology. basically, its a good idea whos time has yet to come.

 

[dejitaru]

It sounds like it's not too far away.

$1/GFLOP/hr sounds like too much. More like $0.003. And these rates would change more than any other. It would depend on the speed of the hardware of the person buying.
You'd see popup ads stating "We pay the highest for your processor cycles!"
These rates would remain very low (like free), as anyone can just buy another dedicated computer rather than paying you.

 

[dkozloski]

Like most ideas the major problem would be, how to make money and administer it. How do you keep track of everything moment by moment and not expend more computer power than you are trying to sell? As a volunteer endeaver with no tariff system it works well i.e., SETI and RC-5.

 

[charrison]

Originally posted by: boran
well, this tought just occured me after reading an (? old ?) article about the spyware integrated into kazzaa using cockcycles from your machine for the "home company" to sell to other companies.

my toughts now are how managable would it be to have you sell your clockcycles to a company in exchange for services (such as MP3's) but then more regulated ... lets say u get $1 for every Ghz/hr (this shouldnt be measured in ghz because of IPC differences but this is just an example)

that way you can collect some money on some virtual account to buy songs with etc...

how does this sound to u, does it sound possible ?

thanks for any opinions ...

It is possible, just not practical on a large scale. The main reason it is not practical is because the organizations that need large amounts of cycles already have large intranets. It becomes very difficult for dissimilar computers on different networks to compete with an intranet of computers on the same network. There are things that can be done to reduce the latency issues, but they will still exist.