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.
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?
This is a cuter equivilent though:
http://www.pluraprocessing.com/
It steals cpu cycles from people playing online games.