tpsdave / Pixabay
Today’s rabbit hole for me is Golem, a group trying to monetize unused processor cycles. Again, this is a throwback to the ideas of, among others, MojoNation. Their alpha will allow Blender users to render CGI in a distributed manner.
The problem with distributing computation across a high latency network like the Internet is that you need problems to be extremely parallel, since almost any amount of communication between nodes is uneconomical. This is fine for things like SETI@home but isn’t great modeling that requires the previous output as input. Two major questions I have: are there enough use cases where someone has the ability to pay for this type of computation where they aren’t worried about have someone see the work they are doing and will the security model be strong enough to get people to run unknown code on their machines.
