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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?




There was a great talk about this in ASPLOS 2008, in the "Wild and crazy ideas" session.

Search http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/WACI-VI/ for "home water heaters".


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 :)


Just one of many reasons why we need more bandwidth to our houses.




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