Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and launched Preemptible VMs).<p>Cool! Like you, I wish people would make productive use of spare cycles.<p>Can I suggest you add a note comparing this to BOINC/gridcoin as well? I think your marketplace is a better idea, but because of the security implications dgacmu pointed out downthread, it shouldn’t be treated lightly.<p>Also, I really like your white paper (<a href="https://vectordash.com/primer" rel="nofollow">https://vectordash.com/primer</a>) as it’s nicely formatted and has pretty icons. I think you should update the comparisons to the cloud providers though. Comparing a Pascal-series (1080 Ti) part to a Kepler part (K80) isn’t particularly fair, as NVIDIA charges about the same for that part as the later P100s and V100s. That is, people should be comparing what the best price/performance ratio is, and all three providers have better options. There’s a secondary question about whether the right comparison is to AWS Spot / Preemptible VMs / Low Priority VMs, but I’m not sure from a quick skim what the likely preemption rate will be with your setup.<p>Finally, let me echo dgacmu in saying it’s too bad that NVIDIA forces all providers to only provide the expensive parts. The best price/performance is certainly the consumer parts (that 1080 Ti compares favorably to a P100 at a fraction of the cost), but both the EULA and otherwise prevent it. You’re not running a direct service / providing things in a data center which is a cool workaround! But you should definitely be more clear about the risks of letting untrusted third-party code to execute against your GPU.<p>Again, great project!
There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service.<p>But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML.<p>How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it?<p>You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) workload, and you've not really solved collusion by a significant portion of the workers.
Creator of Vectordash here! If you have any questions about the platform, feel free to ask away!<p>P.S. I'm @samin100 on Twitter if you enjoy tweets about GPUs!
I wonder when people will start just renting a 99 Euro server with a GTX 1080 from <a href="https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu" rel="nofollow">https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu</a> and sell it for $367.2 / month on Vectordash
This uses LXC Containers. I've always heard that containers are not a replacement for a good security model. What's the risk that someone could use Vectordash to attack the host computer?
Great idea and I am glad somebody actually tries to make an implementation.<p>But unfortunately this won't replace mining: the large scale mining farms have high end GPUs in their rigs, but the rest of the HW is very low end, because that works perfectly for mining and they want their ROI as low as possible.<p>I have a 6 GTX 1070 GPU rig, which would be decent GPUs for AI/ML, but the rest of the rig has a Celeron CPU, 4gb RAM,and a 5400 RPM HDD. Oh, and to be able to see all the GPUs, I had to downgrade all the PCIEx slots to 1x.<p>I am curious what kind of ML tasks would be able to fully utilize these GPUs, on such a low end hardware.
We're coming into the warm seasons in the northern hemisphere, but if this effort survives into autumn, it'll be quite tempting for home-heating.<p>Stoked to see distributed-compute as a paying service making another try. One of these days, it is going to fly.
Considering for hosting. One concern is that I have to expose my IP address to unknown users. I don't know if it's possible, but it will be great that if I can hide my location and purely lend my GPU with less security concerns.
<a href="https://medium.com/@rendertoken" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@rendertoken</a> aims to do the same thing, but for 3D render farm customers.
This sounds pretty awesome. I wish I had perminent internet to the house so I could offer my rigs. I hope this service takes off, it should be a much better use of electricity and gpus than mining. Please do keep developing this, with the down turn in mining there should be a large pool of potential gpus. If this service can connect those gpus to researchers then that should be a lucrative business Ling term.
As others have already pointed out, there are trust issues.<p>The seller can fake the computation to return bogus result is one thing.<p>But even if there is no malicious intent, the resulting computation is still ended up bogus result, the malfunction of the hardware.<p>Commodity hardware isn't that reliable and there are so many commodity GPUs in the wild that looks like working but return incorrect result.