I think that compute power moving towards commodity status would be a great thing, however, I also think there's one big problem that needs to be surmounted at present: bandwidth isn't free.
Practically speaking, to be properly fungible, it should be possible to move compute workloads across the 'Net into whatever environment happens to be cheapest. But for anything being done with large amounts of data, there's a non-negligible cost to moving that data across the Internet, and this in turn can lead to things like lock-in. In fact one could argue that it's almost the only form of lock-in practiced by AWS.
On the other hand, if compute power DOES become a commodity, that would be great, because then Jevons paradox would probably kick in, which could itself lead to true ubicomp etc. One can dream :-)
Instead of buying an electric heater, I'd like to buy a server that automatically sells its power on a market like this to subsidise my electricity bill.
If all electric heaters in the world provided CPU power for us as well, where would we be?
The CPU time on a server located in a data center is worth money, but CPU time on a server in your house is worthless due to bandwidth and other issues.
That's not true. It depends on the kind of workload, which can be CPU-bound, IO-bound, network-bound, etc...
If a workload is truly distributed, simply fetches data blocks to process then goes computing for a while (Example: folding@home), the amount of bandwidth doesn't matter.
Also, some people have substantial amounts of bandwidth to their house :)
> The service is technically surprising. Enomaly did not build a big central infrastructure, because the bandwidth demands “would have killed us”, says Reuven Cohen, the firm’s founder. Instead, it works with Google App Engine, another cloud-computing provider, which gives Enomaly access to a decentralised global system.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Google App Engine is not very "global" and its bandwidth prices are pretty standard unless you're small enough to fit in the free tiers.
offered capacity on 4,000 servers that would otherwise sit unused (probably in a lull between making animated movies)
Not much detail on this. The computers are "probably" doing something part of the time? Really? So when the animation crew goes to use their machines they have to disable them from the commodity network first? What happens if scientists are in the middle of using them? Are the hard drives sometimes unexpectedly full of porno and pirated Mp3s? Is the phone company going to notice the 10000x increase in the data coming in and out of these machines? Are any companies storing personal data on these XYZ random machines?
It's probably running as a low-priority process, so that if any normal process needs CPU time, it get it. I'm currently running Enigma@home and Milkyway@home on my computer, so all of my cores are always at 100%, except when my other programs start to use more than 25%, and then the @home's instantly suspend processing. The only time my system seems to slow down is when starting virtual machines.
I imagine this software is similar, which is why it's not meant for people that need reliable access. If somebody starts rendering in the middle of a SpotCloud job, then the SpotCloud job doesn't continue until the rendering is done. And if the rendering doesn't finish until after the job expires, then the job is restarted on a different computer. The worst thing you could do (from SpotCloud's perspective) would be to have your computer available for 99% of the time it takes to do the job, and then become unavailable until after the deadline, but I imagine that doesn't happen very much.
Practically speaking, to be properly fungible, it should be possible to move compute workloads across the 'Net into whatever environment happens to be cheapest. But for anything being done with large amounts of data, there's a non-negligible cost to moving that data across the Internet, and this in turn can lead to things like lock-in. In fact one could argue that it's almost the only form of lock-in practiced by AWS.
On the other hand, if compute power DOES become a commodity, that would be great, because then Jevons paradox would probably kick in, which could itself lead to true ubicomp etc. One can dream :-)