Flex your computing power!

http://Suchflex.com

by suchflex • 10 years ago

55 79 10 years ago

suchflex.com

dsr_• 10 years ago

The pricing seems odd.

$480/year for a $400 video card? $240/year for 3TB of disk space?

No discussion of bandwidth.

No discussion of security.

No discussion of liability.

kalleboo3• 10 years ago

If you cut through all the abstractions, in the end what you're selling them is electricity, right?

trymas• 10 years ago

Yup. It looks like that. You pay electricity bill for them and they get the coins.

glastra• 10 years ago

And, depending on where you live, most probably at a loss. Here in Spain electricity is so expensive that this is probably a very bad idea.

DevNullDevice• 10 years ago

I have a bunch of unused CPU time on my virtualization cluster. I wonder how the power delta for full-utilization would work with the pay...

jpalomaki• 10 years ago

Might make sense if you want 100 or 1000 GPUs and don't want to run them 24/7. Usually all cloud computing prices tend to be pretty high if you compare them to just renting or purchasing hardware.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

We will be adding: FAQ section, Power Costs calculator, Security section, TOS section to our website soon. Lots of this information is currently communicated to Beta Users through emails, but we are working on consolidating and improving information flow. Thank you for your feedback.

Veratyr• 10 years ago

The disk space seems especially weird. Others have mentioned this but even services like Google Drive or Dropbox can give you storage at ~$8/TB so who's on the other end of this transaction, willing to pay premium prices for low end storage?

danpalmer• 10 years ago

It looks like (although not obvious) that you get paid for running this?

If so, I'm pretty certain that it won't be economical due to the power usage. Great for teenagers with gaming machines that their parents are paying the electricity bill on, and that's about it.

fareesh• 10 years ago

Assuming you max out a 500W PSU 24x7 for 31 days, it's roughly $45 per month I believe, so you are probably right.

flintchip• 10 years ago

Or if you're a university student living in halls!

yAnonymous• 10 years ago

Or for botnets that you aren't paying the electricity bill for.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

Our current Private Beta users earning $10+ per week communicated that they have not noticed any significant changes in their electric bills.

Ameo5• 10 years ago

I find that INCREDIBLY hard to believe. I guess I'll have to wait to see.

homero• 10 years ago

They're mining cryptos

suchflex19• 10 years ago

Our system is a hybrid of blockchain technologies and a distributed computing marketplace.

drinchev• 10 years ago

For 96$ Yearly you give 1TB and for 99$ yearly you can buy Dropbox with that amount of storage.

I don't get how they set such a big price for that.

kalleboo3• 10 years ago

I imagine Dropbox are overselling and banking on most users not using 1 TB. Amazon S3 charges $30/mo for 1 TB of storage.

phaed• 10 years ago

Still doesn't make sense you can find $60 1TB drives.

ne0phyte2• 10 years ago

Some of the "Get Started" links don't work at all and the one at the top only asks for an E-Mail. It hasn't even launched publicly yet.

On a side note: I found the website on my phone really annoying to read since lots of paragraphs are animated and it keeps slowly sliding from left to right/right to left every time you scroll over it again.

EDIT: Talking about this http://i.imgur.com/JVtcTKg.gif

suchflex19• 10 years ago

Could I inquire which browser you're using? All "get started" links should be working. We are publicly launched, however we are onboarding everyone in batches. The next batch will be onboarded by this weekend. Flex on!

Just to confirm, regarding your second point: you found the subtle animation unpleasant? Thank you very much for your feedback.

ne0phyte2• 10 years ago

Yeah I found the animation distracting since it is so slow and keeps sliding in every time you scroll over it.

I'm used to sites having transitions or animations as you scroll, but usually that's only happening once.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

Ok, there was a small error for one of the buttons. It's fixed now. Thanks.

nbmh3• 10 years ago

There seems to be a fundamental issue with this model. If it's economically viable for a user to use this service, there's no reason why the company wouldn't just do it themselves. The only exception is the cost of the hardware, but over the long term this is a relatively small factor compared to the cost of electricity and bandwidth. Especially considering that the company could use much more efficient hardware than the typical home or gaming computer.

I understand the 'sharing economy' desire to make use of underutilized resources, but this doesn't seem like an economically feasible way of doing so. The model works for Uber/Lyft: cars are a relatively high upfront cost compared to the cost of gas, but computer hardware is often less expensive upfront than the electricity costs of running it for a year. Additionally, much of the economic value in a service like Uber or Lyft is provided by the driver, not just the use of the car. In this service, the user doesn't provide any value, in fact, they're using up cycles/space that could otherwise be monetized.

nctr5• 10 years ago

The whole thing is based on Gridcoin and BOINC anyway, so the good thing that comes out of it is that BOINC research projects like Rosetta@home get more computing power for free.

For this the suchflex guys earn Gridcoins, which they can sell directly on the market and convert to money. But a user could leave out the middleman alltogether and just mine Gridcoins (or alternatively other cryptocurrency but for that you need ASICS) themselves.

pliny2• 10 years ago

It's viable because it allows you to sell electricity that other people are paying for, in return for money that you get to keep.

This is harder for the company itself to do, because if they just hire people to go into libraries, universities etc. to install mining bots they might be criminally liable. "Uber for CPU cycles" seems like a less felonious enterprise than installing malware on public-use hardware.

jasode3• 10 years ago

The only exception is the cost of the hardware, but over the long term this is a relatively small factor compared to the cost of electricity and bandwidth.

My electricity rate is is 15.7 cents per kw-hour. During typical usage (MS Office, web browser, programming), my Intel 6-core desktop (without LCD monitor on) draws about 150 watts.

For back-of-the-napkin estimates, let's round the kwh cost up to 16 cents and the wattage to 300 watts (to cover scenario of some of cpu cores being 100% pegged). The electricity cost of 24x7 for one year would be ~$413.

What remains would be bandwidth costs -- if any. I like many others have Verizon FiOS and even if others have Comcast or ATT, there's no obvious residential bandwidth costs I can think of to calculate. Maybe... if the homeowner wants to upgrade the speed from 75GB@$99/month to 150@$199/month because the he wants to download the datasets faster. That extra $100 wouldn't have been spent for plain web browsing. So conceivably, that would be $1200 per year. What we don't know is how big the datasets are that must be downloaded. I assume the upload size would be minimal because the compute tasks appear to be variations on "y_output = computecombinationsmontecarlobruteforce(x_input)." The y_output answer would usually be order-of-magnitude(s) smaller than x_input.

Assuming there are no extra bandwidth costs, it would be hard for a company to buy computer hardware for less than a homeowner's $413/year electricity cost.

Perhaps suchflex's particular business model is financially wrong. However in general terms, it does seem possible to find a monetizing sweet spot of computing tasks that takes advantage of the idle and wasted resources of existing home computers. However, if the homeowner has to buy extra hardware that was only dedicated to suchflex, that's probably where the economics won't make as much sense.

nbmh3• 10 years ago

During typical usage (MS Office, web browser, programming)...

That's the issue though, this wouldn't be similar to your typical usage. Instead, if they're using your GPU to train neural networks, it'll be running close to or at full capacity.

I realize that you rounded the costs up, but lets just look at the costs of a GPU often used for machine learning - Nvidia GTX 980 TI. According to Nvidia, it draws 250W under load which according to your figures would result in a yearly cost of roughly $344. That's just for the reference card, a typical card that a consumer would purchase would draw even more. You can buy a 980 TI for a little more than $400. That doesn't even begin to look at hardware actually designed for commercial and research applications.

I think that it's possible to find a way of monetizing computer resources, however, I think it has more to do with arbitraging differences in electricity costs. Suchflex's model certainly wouldn't work where I live (electricity costs in NYC are roughly 20 cents per kw-hour) but parts of the US are under 10 cents. I could see a company attempting to profit from these differences by setting up hardware in a cheap state and negotiating a favorable electricity rate. Heavy computation could then be done on these networks for significantly less than it could in New York or California.

In summary, the value of a consumer's unused computer has more to do with their electricity rate than their hardware.

allendoerfer• 10 years ago

Projects like this will really shine, when your electrical car is already charged and you use it to sell unused energy from your solar system.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

That's a really great insight and a beautiful vision!

Ameo5• 10 years ago

Exactly that. People have been running BOINC projects (which make up a great deal of the projects people list on that site such as Asteroids, Seti, Mind Modeling, etc.) and they are all volunteer efforts where people give their computing power away for free. I just don't see where they're coming from offering me $30/month for something people have been doing for free for years...

nctr5• 10 years ago

This consists of two different parts, the first is just mining cryptocurrencies, but for that you need ASICS in order to be competitive.

The second part is based on Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency that rewards BOINC computations in a decentralized way. So you do all kind of BOINC projects like SETI@home, Rosetta@home (folding proteins),... and the newly generated coins by inflation get distributed according to research done by each user. Again, the important part is that there is no central authority giving out the coins, but each client queries the Boinc projects individually to find out how much research each user has done and the clients then come to a consensus about this, which is stored in the blockchain and is then the basis for the reward each client gets when staking the next time.

Suchflex is basically just a platform built on top of the Gridcoin platform for these "earn money by doing research" projects and simple cryptocurrency mining on the other hand.

dharma17• 10 years ago

Some cryptocurrencies (like ETH) can't be mined with ASICs, due to large (2gb and rising) RAM requirements

nctr5• 10 years ago

Yes, but suchflex is only about those that you can either mine with ASICS (PoW) or CPUs and GPUs (in this case Proof of Research with Gridcoin).

Pure PoS cryptocurrencies cannot be mined by suchflex.

Ameo5• 10 years ago

If that's the case, their estimated profit is completely bogus. I've been running BOINC pretty much 24/7 on my 2-GPU, 4-core gaming rig for the past 2 months and made about $2.50 so far.

Here's my !stats from the #gridcoin IRC channel:

fediverse> your next staked block will get you: 17 GRC (research owed) <fediverse> per day, average: 5.7 GRC <fediverse> (BTC (per day): 0.00005062 / $ (per day): $0.03 / $ (per 30 days): $0.88 / RAC (estimated): 136287.5 / magnitude (estimated): 28.60)

There's NO way that you're going to make $40/month with a 980 crunching BOINC projects, at least not with gridcoin. Gridcoin is $0.50 - $0.75, depending on where you look, and even the best rigs won't make more than 100 a day at best.

tux1968• 10 years ago

Get Started button did nothing.

Was curious to see what operating systems are supported.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

Hi tux1968, could you please let me know the browser you're using? The "get started" button should take you to an email subscription form. We will onboard current signups by this weekend.

Currently, Windows OS is supported. Mac and Linux support will be released early this Fall. Thanks

suchflex19• 10 years ago

one of the buttons had a small error. it's fixed now. thanks

dharma17• 10 years ago

As others have noted, once you deduct the cost of electricity, there isn't enough money in this for people to bother to "rent" their hardware

pliny2• 10 years ago

Lots of people have access to other people's electricity, often in conjunction with access to other people's hardware.

dharma17• 10 years ago

Great. A distributed theft network

roel_v• 10 years ago

Or excess solar power. I know of several people who switch to electric heating sometimes because they produce more than they consume and they don't get paid for the excess.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

As I mentioned above, our current Beta users earning $10+ / week have communicated that they have not seen any significant changes on their electric bills.

Szpadel• 10 years ago

You can order backup dedicated server for 155 USD/month with contain 5 x 6TB SAS drives. It seems that the price is about 6-7usd for TB So I should get for it 5 x 6 x 6usd = 180USD per month

Other concern is that price for storage isn't linear and multiple small packages are more worth than single big. So I could use my 1tb to get 2x 500GB and get 10usd instead of 8usd.

joining it with above server I should be able to get 10usd per TB, so 5 x 6 x 10 = 300USD per month - 155 USD for server = 145USD profit monthly?

PS: site is hosted on heroku

ps2: you can find extra page in google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PpTl0nt...

hkjgkjy3• 10 years ago

20% commission for the service of not running your bitcoin miner in a terminal window, wow. I wish these guys luck!

nctr5• 10 years ago

It's not only mining Bitcoins, but also earning money by running BOINC proejcts (worldcommunitygrid,...).

Then again, this could also be done without the additional comission by just running Gridcoin.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

We never mine bitcoin. Our system is a hybrid of blockchain technologies and distributed computing marketplace. Thank you for wishing us best of luck! :D Flex on

hkjgkjy3• 10 years ago

Yeah yeah, Eth is pretty much the same thing, but with a turing-complete script. Anyways looking forward to see what happens to you guys going forward.

jklmnn• 10 years ago

What I always wonder about those kind of projects is why you never find any specs about the software they use. Not only that it is closed source (what I expect) but they don't give any information about how big it is and what you would need to run it. You have no control about what is executed on your PC (possibly as root?). In my eyes it completely destroys the integrity and trustworthy of any computer it is installed on.

I also wonder how they calculate the money you get just for having certain hardware. It says a 6 core 3.2Ghz CPU pays out $28/month but what if I have an average of 70% CPU usage the whole time (unrealistic, but still what if)? Do they pay me still $28 even though they only get 30% of what they could get or do they reduce the payment or even worse does the software just take the whole CPU for it self and make the rest of the computer unusable?

I've seen some similar projects (don't remember the names) but none of those actually answered only one of these questions.

SmallDeadGuy• 10 years ago

I don't think they pay you just based on hardware specs. It's a factor of time that you allow the program to run for, and how much usage of the hardware it gets. Their estimates are probably some middle ground of 50% of the day and 70% usage or something, with the $28+ meaning you could get more for longer/higher usage. It's unlikely that the average working person, with only a couple hours in the evening with their machines turned on (and also actively using them), would earn nearly that amount for the limited time. Especially gamers, where they have significantly better hardware than the average home pc but likely have much higher usage of the hardware. I doubt my pc with a gtx 970 would earn close to the $32 it mentions as I only use it for a couple hours an evening, and in that time the card is working really hard playing modern games in 4k resolution.

deutronium3• 10 years ago

I guess you wouldn't want to perform any mission critical computation on this type of system, unless you can verify the results you obtain using it are accurate, as I can imagine its fairly easy for people to tamper with your data. But I imagine theres a number of types of tasks it would be really good for.

I'm curious how the technique presented in "Reusable Garbled Circuits and Succinct Functional Encryption" https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/733.pdf could potentially be utilised in such a system. I'm assuming it currently isn't possible due to computation overhead?

throwaway7767• 10 years ago

I think the general use case for this is the same as for most crowdsourced computing projects - problems that are hard to solve but whose solutions are easy to verify.

deutronium3• 10 years ago

Yeah, that'd definitely make sense. I still really like the idea.

sjayasinghe• 10 years ago

If the cost is not an issue you could run the same computation on multiple clients and verify that they all produce the same result.

deutronium3• 10 years ago

Yeah, that seems to be how SETI does it

Ameo5• 10 years ago

Distributed computing is most useful for stuff that you can, well, distribute. A lot of BOINC projects do this by dividing work up into workunits. They send out a packet of data to crunch, the clients crunch it, and return the results.

Many of these workunits are optimization problems without a clear solution and rely on algorithms using randomness, stuff like protein folding and bitcoin mining are examples of this. The nice thing about those is that you can send them out to as many clients as you want and just pick the best answer.

qrpike2• 10 years ago

Signed up for this and minutes later got notifications from LogMeIn with failed login attempts from Russia. Never had this happen EVER before.

qrpike2• 10 years ago

109.105.177.184 Was the attempted IP.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

That's quite unusual. At the moment your email simply goes to a Mailchimp email list. We will onboard current signups by this weekend.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

Wow, posted this before going to bed and woke up to lots of comments and interest. Thank you very much for your excitement and support!

Ameo5• 10 years ago

Has anyone else noticed the paid membership tiers?

"Maximize your earnings with a SuchFlex Pro Account"

Couldn't sound like a sketchier pay money to get money scheme if they wanted it to.

suchflex19• 10 years ago

How so? The reasoning here is: If you're earning $50 / month, the 20% commission results in a $10 commission fee. Since Pro Account is $9.99 / month and Zero commissions, a user earning more than $50 / month (and we have a few users approaching $100 / month in Beta) would make the financially reasonable decision to pay the monthly Pro Account fee instead and then forgo any other commissions.

Flex your computing power!

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