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Gateway Puts Wasted Cycles to Work 269

Posted by michael from the waste-not-want-not dept.
f. liszt writes "Gateway will be offering for sale to corporations the processing power available from networked display PCs in their stores -- seems like a logical enough idea."
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Gateway Puts Wasted Cycles to Work More

Gateway Puts Wasted Cycles to Work

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  • Would you want,... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Technician ( 215283 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:45AM (#4853705)
    Your company payroll dependant on machines that shoppers can tinker with wihle on display at a store?

    Seriously, what data would you pay to have crunched in public?

    • Re:Would you want,... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:01AM (#4853833)
      Your company payroll dependant on machines that shoppers can tinker with wihle on display at a store?

      This has been a problem since the 1970s. Back then, for some reason whenever we were in a Radio Shack it seemed funny to stop by a TRS-80 display model and type in something like:

      10 PRINT "FART! FART! FART!"
      20 GOTO 10
      RUN

      The salespeople probably would have chased us out of the store if they weren't so busy scribbling down every customer's address and the part numbers of every blister pack in the store on those little paper sales slips.

      • Or the other classic:

        10 PRINT "Welcome to the Spectrum 48k display model"
        20 INPUT "What is your name? ", NAME$
        30 PRINT NAME$, ", you are a tosser!"
        40 GOTO 30
        RUN

        Ok, I may have forgotten some of the details of Sinclair BASIC, but you get the idea :-)

        • Re:Would you want,... (Score:3, Informative)

          by motardo ( 74082 )
          too bad most americans don't know what a tosser is.

          A quaint English term of abuse referring to someone who masturbates a lot. This is different from "dosser" which merely refers to a homeless person sleeping in the open.

      • Re:Would you want,... (Score:5, Funny)

        by operagost ( 62405 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:24AM (#4854039) Homepage Journal
        I used to do something like:

        10 input "Hi! What's your name";a$
        20 print "You sure are ugly, ";a$;"!"
        30 goto 10

        Coming back later, I noted that people would say very nasty things to the insolent Commodore 64.

        It's too bad I wasn't more enterprising then, or else I would have typed:

        10 input "Hi! Please enter your SSN or credit card number for a free gift!";a$
        20 open "goodies",8,4,1
        30 print#1 a$
        40 close#1
        50 print "Thanks! I love you lots!"
        100 goto 10

        Good thing they usually didn't have a disk drive attached.

    • Basic account protection (Score:4, Informative)

      by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:01AM (#4853845) Homepage Journal

      Your company payroll dependant on machines that shoppers can tinker with wihle on display at a store?

      The user of a properly administered public kiosk (i.e. kiosk user is a normal user, not root) won't be able to affect any process that his account doesn't own.

    • I love changing the homepage of computers at the gateway store, or the roadrunner kiosk at the mall to http://www.2600.com [2600.com]. I come back later and they're all freaked out because they think they got h4x0r3d by some 1337 d00d.

    • Re:Would you want,... (Score:5, Informative)

      by tmark ( 230091 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:30AM (#4854097)
      Some perspective is in order. While I don't think the article mentioned whose solution Gateway was using, most grid computing platforms running on untrusted machines are going to use encryption, most machines aren't going to look at enough of a job to be useful even if the encryption was broken, and each individual job is going to be run on multiple machines to ensure one machine doesn't (intentionally or not) return faulty data.

      What data would people pay to have crunched in public ? Well, I can tell you that animation houses, financial shops and biotechnology companies are all crunching their data "in public".
    • My favorite was the program that would spew out "I am $40 cheaper at Sears". Which of course brings up what Gateway should really do: sell advertising space on their displays instead. I.E. "Buy me and come visit my porn site at foomeister.com".
    • Sure, I'm not afraid. But then again, I know what technology [ud.com] is powering this network.

      disclaimer: yes I work for United Devices. That's why I know our security rocks in the first place.

  • Corpoprations don't need to buy processing power (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Moderation abuser ( 184013 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:45AM (#4853709)
    The corporation I work for has 110,000 desktop PCs. Never mind the servers.

    They have plenty of processing power.

    What they need is the internal organisation and the software skills to make use of their existing investment in systems.

    • Re:Corpoprations don't need to buy processing powe (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Annoyed Coward ( 620173 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:53AM (#4853772) Homepage Journal
      They have plenty of processing power.

      Absolutely. And the corporate intranet is much faster and secure than sending data all over net and getting it processed.

      My 2e-2 cents.

      • I think the point of this is not to provide processing power to the coorporations with huge numbers of computers, but to the smaller ones which can't afford them, but quite possibly could afford to pay "rent" on existing computers. Perhaps all I want is the capability to run some simulations in the background, and don't want to slow down the computers my users are running in the office. Should I invest in a cluster? Or pay less to buy time from someone like Gateway, which, when I am done with the current project, doesn't just sit there and collect dust.

        This would seem like a great idea for those who are looking to cut costs and may not have a user for the required equipment once the current project is done. Sure you can try to resell stuff, but there is no promise of a sale, and it takes time and money to get rid of old equipment.

        While this might not be a good idea for the mega-coorporations. It could work for smaller groups (and even local governments).

        Though it is true that sensitive data couldn't be handled in this way.

    • Yes, but is there a way for a company to tap into their own extra processing power? Is there a Intranet style version of the application/delivery they will use?
      • As I said, they need the organisational and software skills to make use of the power they have available. And IT management with some vision... and balls. This is the real issue.

        Software architectures already exist which could be used. COSM [mithral.com] is a free example, though I suspect the licensing may rule that out in a commercial environment. More stuff here: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Computer _Science/Distributed_Computing/Platforms/

        • As I said, they need the organisational and software skills to make use of the power they have available. And IT management with some vision... and balls. This is the real issue.

          You are right!

          As usual, the technological problems are the easy ones. The difficult problems in this area are managerial. And if you have any experience dealing with wetware, you know that it takes a lot more than balls and vision to get this kind of thing implemented properly. It takes money, lots of it, for planning, training, meetings, and all the other crap that has to be done when dealing with people.

          Seems to me like Gateway is offering something very interesting that could affect a lot of "make or buy, or do without" decisions. If they can sell time on their grid for less than the TCO of developing and maintaining an in-house grid, then they've got a winner. They'll be able to sell service to your company, even though you've got eleventy jillion workstations sitting around, because management will see that its more costly to get you-all to get your act together than to buy Gateway's service.

      • Yup, there is. United Devices [ud.com] sells the MetaProcessor which does exactly that, tap into the power of your intranet's underutilized desktops.

        UD is also the software enabler behind Gateway's Processing On Demand [yahoo.com]

        and UD also happens to be my employer</disclaimer>

    • The corporation I work for has 110,000 desktop PCs. Never mind the servers.

      Any corporation or even small business I've known has no problem getting CPU power, you're right. If things are desperate, they can hook up a bunch of old monitor-less pentium 1's and 2's as a Beowulf cluster and use that. Aside from those processing weather and DNA data, what the world is truly hungry for is bandwidth.
      • There are many computational problems that require far more power than a 50-100 person company can easily pay for. 'Fabless' semiconductor manufacturers and small drug discovery companies are two examples. Even for larger companies, renting time can make a lot of sense if they have an infrequent need for large processing power.

        Something else to consider is that unlike most corporations, Gateway continually rotates the newest machines available into their showrooms, so their grid will always be growing in power.
    • This guy can ALWAYS use computing power ... and it appears as though he has money to burn! I'm sure that he'd buy processing power in bulk!!!! I wonder how much bandwidth is included in Crap-way's "processing power" price .... and if they threw in a couple SMTP servers .... that would be a steal!

      This way, customers could come to the Gateway store for a sneak preview of the spam email they would be receiving that week! Everybody wins!!! :)

      BTW: For those people the don't read /. regularly, this is a (weak) follow-up to this article [slashdot.org] about our favorite person, notorious email spam king, Alan Ralsky. :)
      • Think about it -- what's the most popular way for spammers to get their "goods" out into public?

        Open mail relays!

        Spammers are already using a great deal of other peoples' computing power without compensating them any for the cycles used, the black eye of blacklisting, etc.

  • Insecure? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Runny ( 613231 )
    Seems they would have a hard time guaranteeing security.

    • Re:Insecure? (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmigaAvenger ( 210519 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:57AM (#4853815) Journal
      Easy, use a model similar to seti. First, each packet is processed twice, by two different machines. If you get different results, go back and do some checking. That is also assuming everything is encrypted and the binary is somewhat secure also. If processing each one twice wastes too much power, do every 3 or whatever, and if you run into a problem re-analyze the machines past few packets to see where it started. And obviously if you get bad packets it should be fairly easy to track the machine down and correct it.
    • What if they "forget" to reformat the hard disk and re-install before delivering the sold machine?

      Oops - can't reformat and re-install 'cause Windows licensing doesn't allow that? Awwwwww .... pity ... (cue sound of evil laughter)

  • Then, the next step... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:46AM (#4853718) Homepage
    ...they'll start selling the idle time on their customers computers to other customers.

    After all, that Pentium IV has plenty of power left over since it's probably only running an e-mail app and web-broswer (and a virus or two, and some spyware, and probably Kazaa and WinMX...)

  • Hahahaha (Score:4, Funny)

    by zatz ( 37585 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:47AM (#4853727) Homepage
    They must have one hell of an inventory problem if they are resorting to this for some extra cash!

  • other companies should follow... (Score:4, Funny)

    by bje2 ( 533276 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:50AM (#4853752)
    hmmmm...a company selling idle time with their product models to make money...doesn't sound like a bad idea...i think victoria's secret should get in on this...

  • funny... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mirko ( 198274 )
    I heard about export limitations concerning computers...
    Now, if Gateway starts selling CPU cycles, how can they guarantee that this won't be used by organisations located in these embargo'ed countries ?
    Otherwise, if they can control this, this means they are selling some spyware... the CPU cycles are just a Trojan.

  • Consumer or corporate? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by icantblvitsnotbutter ( 472010 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:53AM (#4853771)
    I'd understood Gateway's stated business goal as being "get back to the basics" of what made them popular: targeting the consumer, and focusing on direct sales. I'm not clear how either seeling cycles to corporate clients or continuing its stores fits into that. Perhaps this is a way to subsidize their stores.

    I'd think it'd be more interesting to see them do some serious research into exploiting this type of service. Lord knows that hardware R&D is dead.

    Like, what about selling this as an on-demand service to consumers? What about this as a distinguishing factor for people into video editing or rendering? Those aren't necessarily lossless applications, IMIO (in my ignorant opinion). It'd be cool to be able to have an on-demand render farm for small-budget indie movie releases, no?

  • Power (Score:5, Insightful)

    by glueball ( 232492 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:53AM (#4853775)
    It's a shame these systems are left on in the first place.

    What is the power consumption of these systems? What a waste of cheap electricity.

    If you need high availability, great, leave it on. If you are not going to use it, turn it off.

    • According to the article these are the machines in Gateway's retail stores. If they turned them off to save power can you imagine what happens when a customer comes in?

      This company is selling PC's. They need them ON to display them. They don't want the customer waiting for the computer to come out of sleep mode (assuming it does so successfully) or boot.

    • The power used by these systems is nothing compared to the reatail lighting in any store, but it serves the same purpose.

      If they didn't need to turn them on, they might as well use cardboard cutouts and keep the lights off... people won't be able to tell the difference.

  • That's stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OmniVector ( 569062 ) <see my homepage> on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:54AM (#4853787) Homepage
    It's not exactly free for gateway to wire every single machine to the net, including the the extra cost of maxing out the cpu. It DOES take more power when your cpu is at 100% compared to 0%. More power == higher electricity bills.

    Grand idea i suppose, but it's going to cost them a pretty penny just to hook all of them up.
    • I would imagine that all of these computers are already connected to the internet so people can try them out. I know the Gateway store I went to was like this. They definitely had some sort of broadband or better connection too.

    • Re:That's stupid (Score:3, Informative)

      by Decibel ( 5099 )
      The incremental cost of electricity for a computer that is idle verses one running at 100% CPU is actually very, very small.

      If we assume that the CPU draws 60W more at 100% use than at 0% (Intel lists maximum heat disipation of 60W for the P4 [intel.com]), then 8,000 computers would consume a total of 480kW. Sounds like a lot, right? Now consider that so far today, California has had a maximum power draw of 28,000GW [caiso.com], which is 58 *million* times more than 480kW. And that's just one state.
  • All these new Desktop computers seem to have Power Down buttons on the keyboard and i love pressing them while walking tru a computer store....

    Sorry....thats just the way i am....cant help it
    • Any decent grid software will gracefully handle failures due to power-offs, whether they're due to power/hardware failure or some malicious sod hitting power buttons.

      I'm hoping Gateway are smart enough to consider that...

  • Income statement... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ratface ( 21117 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:54AM (#4853793) Homepage Journal
    "Gateway has 272 Gateway Country stores. With 7,800 floor model PCs, ..."

    The advantage, for customers, is the price. For an introductory price of 15 cents per computer hour, plus set-up fees, Gateway is making the power of supercomputing available to companies that might not be able to afford it otherwise.     "

    If they were (extremely theoretically) able to sell all their computing power for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year their income would be:

    15c * 7800 computers = $1170/hour
    $28080 / day
    $10249200 / year.

    Not too shabby - but somehow the similarities between this business model and (let's say) web advertising to support an otherwise loss-making venture make me shiver.

    I imagine some Gateway exec is sitting in his cow-themed office rubbing his hands with glee looking at those figures. Good luck making it happen!

    • Re:Income statement... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bje2 ( 533276 )
      i have no idea, but what does it cost to leave each computer running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in terms of power consumption...as apposed to leaving each computer on during store hours, and then turning them off at night...just curious, cause it seems that would be additional overhead in this plan...i'm sure it's not on the $10 billion level though...
    • That comes to $1300 of revenue per PC. If you're going to spend that much, why not just buy the PCs yourself? That way, when all the calculating is over with, you still have a useful computer system.

      I know that some companies may not want the overhead associated with paying for support techs, etc. so it might actually make sense for them. But for a good number of corporate customers, it will still make sense to buy their own hardware.
      • Because you have to set them up and pay people to administer them. Gateway already pays these costs for other reasons (ie to let potential customers play with them) so this is much cheaper than doing it yourself for limited supercomputing. However, if you know that you are going to need to use this much processing power regularly into the foreseeable future, doing it yourself would be wise since you would get save money on it after a reasonable period of time.

        Of course, in this case you might be better off seeing if you could buy a used Department of Energy system that they've lost interest in after getting a new massivelier parallel system to do their simulations on. Or something like that anyway.
      • If it's $1300 per year, why can't I use my own PC to earn some money instead of this lame SETI@Home stuff that doesn't pay anything?

        I think 15 cents per hour is way too high. If there were really demand at such a high price you could become a millionaire just by purchasing PCs and a network connection. One cent per hour of computing time might be a reasonable market rate, once lots of people with large networks of PCs get involved. At that price I might buy some computing time myself when I had a big set of jobs to run (like some very CPU-intensive modifications to zlib I'm playing with), and at other times sell.
      • For this $1300 (I didn't do the math myself, I'll take your word) you get the newest of the newest every 6 months (that's how often Gateway refreshes all their display computers with the latest model)

        So for $1300 you _always_ have the latest, fastest model inc tech support, electricity, write-off, maintenance, etc.

        Also, if you have a need for only 1 month of computing power, you pay 1/12th of that figure AND still get all the advantages (write-off, etc) I mentioned.

        For really big companies who need this kind of computing power 24/7/365, just use your already present desktops in your company and install the Enterprise version of the MetaProcessor platform [ud.com].

  • Spare Cycles @ Work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Knunov ( 158076 ) <eat@my.ass> on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @08:56AM (#4853804) Homepage
    I don't understand why companies don't include such things on new PCs as an option.

    Just include the .EXE file for Folding@Home (or one of the lesser projects :), a link on the desktop and an explanation of what the user can do with his/her idle CPU time. The number crunching power of millions upon millions of PCs wouldn't go to waste.

    While a Sysadmin at a very large hotel chain, which I can't specify (but it's a BIGGUN'), I used every machine on the network to fold protein. Did the math once and it came out to being something like a 80GHz machine w/ a couple gigs of RAM.

    We even got as high as 22 [remail.org] in the overall rankings.

    I recommend that other people in charge of large networks do the same. It hurts NOTHING, but could do a lot of good.

    Knunov

    • Re:Spare Cycles @ Work (Score:5, Informative)

      by Agent Green ( 231202 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:13AM (#4853944)
      Tell that to the poor tech in Georgia who was getting sued by his employer for doing the exact same thing:

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23477.htm l

      It hurts nothing until it's your ass getting kicked.
    • It hurts NOTHING, but could do a lot of good.

      This horse has already been beat, but it does hurt the company you work for which is paying for the machines that's running the clients for you. It hurts them just as much as if you'd been renting out your hotel's vacant rooms for charity, while stocking and cleaning them up yourself afterwards. You're lucky you didn't get fired.
    • It hurts NOTHING, but could do a lot of good.

      It's not an absolute. There are some people that have had difficulties when running CPU munching background processes. Sometimes the clients don't behave properly.

      Some (most?) CPUs also consume more power when running at 100% than they would at 50% or 0% usage.

      I have started dnet on my two fastest machines, when playing video, background clients cause a faint, yet noticable judder in video playback.
  • Why not just run the Cancer agent [ud.com] on them? The publicity generated from this will certainly be worth more for Gateway than selling processor time, simply considering how much money (and time) it would cost to set up the network.
  • Gateway Inc, increasing their profit by a total of $2000, $1000 of which will go to the Long Island, NY store that found the winning key. Gateway stock (NYSE:GTW) immediately went up to to 3.51 from a previous $3.50 per share following the announcement.

  • Traffic? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:01AM (#4853834)
    Can the CPU cycles on in store computers, really be worth enough in the market to make up for the administration headaches / overhead? They can't charge too high a price, as they will be competing with volunteer networks and all sorts of venders selling off their customers idle cpu cycles, and while you might have fairly high bandwidth between cpus within one store, communication between locations will probably be simply over the internet.

    How much intersite traffic will this generate over gateway's ISP? Are they selling just the CPU cycles? All paralized computations will need some communications between nodes, how much do you get with your $0.15/hour?

    Perhaps instead, they should sell advertising space on the screens of idle computers if they need some cash. Any computer, anywhere in the world can donate/sell its CPU cycles, I would think the market price for CPU cycles will be quite low. But not every computer in the world as hundreds of shoppers walking past it all day long with big wads of cash in their pockets.
    • The idea is that these resources are already generating profit in the form of sales. They have to pay administrators already. However, if they make use of the idle time they can get at least a little more money out of their stores. I'm betting that $0.15 per computer hour is slightly lower than the normal rate for this sort of thing since they are really just doing this to subsidize their stores.

  • Coming Soon... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pr0t0plasm ( 183810 ) <pr0t0plasm@NOsPaM.luckymud.org> on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:05AM (#4853877) Homepage
    Pet store hamster wheels sell power to the grid!

  • How Gateway Plans to Make Money (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:12AM (#4853936) Homepage Journal
    "Gateway has 272 Gateway Country stores. With 7,800 floor model PCs, ..."

    1. Install distributed computing client on first PC.
    2. Install distributed computing client on second PC.
    3. Install distributed computing client on third PC.
    4. ...
    ...
    ...
    7801. Profit!

    I have a suggestion for Gateway's CTO: Calculate the money you've made running SETI@Home and the cancer project on your desktop for the last year, and multiply that by 7,800. That's what you can expect.

  • technical details (Score:3, Interesting)

    by foo(foo(foo(bar))) ( 263786 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:15AM (#4853972) Homepage

    Does anyone know any technical details about this projects.

    Do they indent to do LAM/MPI style communications or will it push the client code and execute it independe3ntly (ie. a SETI type project).

    It's really an issue of weather or not all the nodes are equals on the network or not..


    • Re:technical details (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Decibel ( 5099 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @11:08AM (#4854940) Journal
      I know a few details, since I help create the software [ud.com] :)

      The software is push-based, just like the software you can download [ud.com] to participate in our global research projects. Unlike many other distributed computing clients though, ours has the ability to update itself, which greatly reduces administration overhead.

      Also, although the client software normally operates independantly in a push-based manner, it is possible to do MPI as well, it just has to be coded as part of the actual application software.

  • That plan sounds like an act of desparation to me. If they are charging $0.15 per compute hour per CPU, that amounts to a maximum of around $10m/year. From the customer's point of view, $0.15 per compute hour per CPU is probably what they would pay to own.

    But grid computing costs lost of administrative, buyer, and labor headaches, both for the provider and the customer. I really doubt this makes sense when all is said and done.

  • It is M$ gimmick. They're gonna take your snaps while shopping PCs. Have a look at this new technology [geocities.com] that takes snap through monitor.

  • Oh, That's great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TPS Report ( 632684 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:20AM (#4854005) Homepage
    [sales] And here we have our 300 series [gateway.com] machine
    [cust ] Neat! (opens IE [pivx.com])
    [cust ] It seems a little slow opening up a browser; I thought you said it was fast?
    [sales] It is! It just appears slow [ernestfanclub.com] because we're maxing out the processor.
    [cust ] Why would you do that on a display machine that's supposed to be showing off the machine's strengths?
    [sales] We make $0.03/hour crunching numbers in the background.
    [cust ] (on cellphone) Honey.. sell the Gateway stock. They're obviously in trouble.
    • Yeah, so I ask the guy at the store to fire up Unreal Tournament 2003 to see if the machine is really fast. But because this machine is busy crunching numbers for someone I get jerkiness and it just doesn't perform right.

      So I think the machine is lame and don't buy it.

      Hey at least Gateway made $0.15

  • Amazing! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    GWB: Ha! We've just discovered your plans, damn terrorist!

    Saddam: Terrorist for what?

    GWB: UN inspectors just found these mass destruction weapons plans on your PC.

    Saddam: Heh, check better, yankee. That's a mirror of YOUR mass destruction weapons plans at the Pentagon! We just sold some processing power and storage space to your network.

    GWB: Oh...

    Saddam: Wait. One more thing.

    GWB: What?

    Saddam: Here's the bill. Cash only, thanks.
  • Now you can hack Exxon just by going to Gateway Country!

    Seriously, given the vulnerabilities of Windows and lack of security traditionally found on floor model PCs, not to mention the thought that hundreds of people a day have access to the PCs, I don't expect many companies will take up Gateways offer.
    • Seriously, given the vulnerabilities of Windows and lack of security traditionally found on floor model PCs, not to mention the thought that hundreds of people a day have access to the PCs, I don't expect many companies will take up Gateways offer.


      Answer: Install Linux .... duh!

      Besides, how many people would want to buy a PC with a terrible OS with a pretty GUI interface??

  • Sounds interesting, maybe HP/Compaq should consider trying it this Christmas. I hear that they're going to have a lot of computers sitting around idle ...

  • How about burn-in systems? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Deton8 ( 522248 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:30AM (#4854098)
    I've always thought that a PC manufacturer could use the thousand or so PCs that are in burn-in at any given time for render farms or other parallelized projects.
  • in 2000 when I was gainfully employed by Gateway, I has RC5-64 running on about 20 systems, shot our rankings through the roof :)

    This really isn't that bad of an idea, just as long as the info being crunched, as said before, is of a non-proprietary nature. However, I HIGHLY doubt that UD/Stanford/SETI would be willing to shell out x^5 dollars for a crack at the Gateway network, they'll always have people like me who do it for fun :)

  • Clue alert: THERE IS NO MARKET! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @09:34AM (#4854116)
    It's already been tried. Several companies have come and gone trying to sell distributed computing. The secret is: there's no market for it! None! It's been tried and has failed. Any company that needs serious crunch power already has it within their own organization. Hell, shitty little Intel chips can do much more than the average PC user will ever need 'em to do. Universities occasionally need more power for esoteric physics problems, but they can't afford to pay. Hell, even SETI@Home couldn't even get enough data in fast enough to be processed. I can't imagine that there's that much demand out there for something like this, if any.

  • Enron could have used this concept to balance their books.

  • This is a great idea and will work fine. For the 2-3 people that go to Gateway Country to hack the computers, you won't be doing much. Soon someone will come over and kick you out and restart whatever you tried to screw up. Just beacuse you can do it doesn't mean that you should (it is illegal afterall).

    Anyway, in the end, this is brilliant, and I'm surprized that it took so long. Though I really feel that the only companies that will be able to utilize this ar ethe Drug companies to take care of some algorithms for them. A random hacker will have to spend their entire life trying to hack through to figure out what exactly is going on. The hacker will have 0 knowledge of what is being run on those computers and won't have the first clue as to what to make of the data. Stop pretending that these compuers are just made for hacking and breaking into. If this is what you're doing day in and day out, pick up a book or get a real job.

    Anyway, I hope that this idea takes off and that others can really benefit from this. What would be ever better is if some comapanies "dontate" their spare computer time to organizations that try to produce results much like Corporations. That would greatly benefit everyone, and if people are hacking in and trying to break this...then they're just causing society more grief.

    hey, an extra 10MM can't hurt Gateway all that much can it?
  • Now, that's called true multitasking !!!! Utilizing their resources, while on display, is brilliant. I agree that may not find many corporate clients, but what about supporting the open source community ? Developers can play with the grid, or enthusiasts can experiment with this concept. International organizations such as WHO which do not need to keep their research confidential can also exploit this setup. The other advantage here is that these gateway machines will not be loaded with heavy applications (MS apps on corporate computers will minimize the contribution of that's computer's processing power!. Atleast Gateway is trying to be constructive....
  • I'm pretty sure that if we get into this whole distributed computing thing and it gets so big it starts to evolve into a neural network and decides that it should be in charge of us that we should make sure that it is a bunch of Linux boxes that takes over because then everything would be like open and free at least, and we could still wear Tshirts and jeans. Or if not that, then the new net master is OSX based, because then we'd have really cool uniforms and stuff and everyone would have all day to write songs and draw comics. That would be cool. What I don't want is for this Gateway/Windows thing to become sentient, because then we would have a world dominated by an evil Master who numbed out our creative impulses, tortured us with relentless conformity, and controlled all political and economic traffic. Pretty much like it is now, come to think of it.
    • What I don't want is for this Gateway/Windows thing to become sentient, because then we would have a world dominated by an evil Master who numbed out our creative impulses, tortured us with relentless conformity, and controlled all political and economic traffic

      The machines always turn on their creator, usually after wiping out a limited set of innocent civilians and scientists. The glass is really half full on this one...

  • Salesman: And here's the new top of the line Gateway, it's so fast you'll be able to browse the web and balance your checkbook in human time, just like you could on a 200Mhz Pentium.

    Customer: Why does the mouse lag behind by 2-3 seconds when I move it.

    Salesman: Uhhh.. because Gateway is selling the CPU cycles of their demo machines to someone else and Windows is giving the number cruncher more priority than the mouse interrupts.

    Customer: Yeah, right - how about this iMac over here, it looks fast.
  • <quote>With 7,800 floor model PCs, each with an average processing power of 2 gigahertz, Gateway says it has about 14 teraflops of computing power (a teraflop is 1 trillion operations per second). By comparison, the 10 most powerful computers in the world range from three to about 36 teraflops.</quot>

    A terraflop is not a trillion operations per second , it's a trillion floating-point instructions per second. Floating-point instructions are expensive on intel/amd hardware, even with a deditcated FPU.

    Maybe someone should hit them with a suit for false advertising.

  • Sometimes I get a feeling that MS Windows is already doing this behind our back. Is there ANY sane reason why a 1Ghz machine should take 2 seconds to switch between two programs???

  • No charity? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by John_Renne ( 176151 )
    I wonder if Gateway didn't think of charity. This way reactions are the company must be in some kind of trouble. If they would have donated the CPU-cycles to charity (I'm thinking of united devices [ud.com] or something like that) I guess publicity would have been on their hands.
  • Gateway's plan could have use to smaller businesses. Assuming that you pay for the entire computer day, that's $3.60 per PC.

    Look at the economics of the situation: "renting" 200 computers (averaging 2.0 Ghz) for a day is going to be $720... The cost of buying the equivalent number of Microtels from Walmart.com is (assuming 800 Mhz Duons have half the CPU performance), 400 machines at 300 dollars == $120,000. Plus electricity, networking, etc.

    What's going to be Problem #1 is who Gateway sells this to. Large companies and enterprises will already have an extensive network of PCs. That pretty much leaves small and medium sized companies that need a lot of processing power in a very short time, with the loss of one or more pieces not effecting the whole. (The only "common" app that I can think of customers would be computer-generated animation... but I need more caffeine :)

    Problem #2 is setup, software, and licensing. I don't think Gateway is going to flick a switch at 9:00 PM and have their WinXP computers start running BSD, Linux, etc. On top of that, what will the set-up cost be? Will companies be paying $20/hour per tech to install the software, or is it remote installation with a flat fee? But the killer will be licenses... unless the company is using free or homebrew applications, will they have to pay for each computer in the cluster?

    It could work for Gateway. If they give free upgrades when new machines come in, and performance guarantees (if a PC isn't performing at 100%), it might catch on. But like another poster said, CPU cycles are fairly cheap, but bandwidth is expensive.

  • A tale of woe and heartbreak (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Tuesday December 10, 2002 @12:07PM (#4855233) Homepage Journal
    A few years ago, there was a company named Jostens that examined their IT costs. Jostens is in the class ring business. If you've got a high school ring or college ring, chances are that you bought it from Jostens.

    Anyway, somebody at Jostens took a look at their IT department and had a brilliant idea: everything these fools in IT did came out as a debit somewhere on the company spreadsheet, so why not try to turn that around? Make those slackers earn their keep? So, Jostens became a class ring AND consulting company.

    I said this was to be a tale of woe and heartbreak, and I did not lie to you. Jostens found that the consulting business was MUCH different than the class ring business, and that they weren't any good at it. Jostens lost a lot of money, and their silliness was splashed across papers such as the Wall Street Journal. So, Jostens learned the hard way that sometimes what accountants like to call a debit really isn't such a thing at all. Many manager types learned for the first time that IT adds value to an organization and that domination of the class ring market doesn't automatically mean success in another market.

    So what does this have to do with anything? It seems to me someone at Gateway took a look at their accounting spreadsheets, noticed that the company owns a lot of PC's that aren't being used for ANYTHING. All they do is sit in the stores, and cost money. Bright idea: let's actually USE those computers for something - make them earn their keep! The rest of the Gateway story doesn't need to be related here. Essentially Dell lives happily ever after.

  • Gateway enters the top 5 of supercomputers with the world's largest Beowulf cluster.

  • Installed at assembly? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rip!ey ( 599235 )
    So when and where exactly would they install the software for this.

    Would they leave it up to the technicians (ha! salespeople) at each retail outlet? Or would they include it as part of the disk image installed at the factory where the software runs automatically on bootup?

    My guess would be the second option.

    This would however mean that *every* Gateway computer sold includes the required software, and the end users who buy from Gateway may well end up as part of a distributed computing project without their explicit permission. All it needs is some obscure legal mumbo in fine print and users have no recourse should they find out.

  • A better business model (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Xarin ( 320264 )
    A better business model for Gateway and companies that have access to a large amount of PCs idling might be to donate the spare cycles to a charity and take a tax break. There is not much downside to this and there are lots of upsides such as it does not acutally have to work very well to get the writeoff versus trying to make it profitable as well as being able to advertise how they are trying to make a difference.

  • DDoS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rela ( 531062 )
    How long before someone cracks their network and makes this into the largest DDoS tool ever?
  • I know this is just a fluff piece, but it left me with some questions:

    • IP. Does Gateway get a cut?
    • Security - source code. I've got this app that's kinda secret, I'm not sure if I want to get you the source code. *
    • Security - net, evil customers. All these guys are gonna have to get data units and deposit done units someplace. Most places I know, floor models aren't hooked up to the net. Now they will be, the security of those floor models are going to need to be changed.
    • Security - net, evil hackers. Someone already said about being a huge DDoS systerm.
    • Downtime - Will Gateway guarantee QOS when the machines are "administered" by salespeople?


    The item marked * above can be simply answered "Well don't use it if you're worried". The IP issues may be the sticking point.

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