QMachine – a supercomputer made out of crowdsourced Web browsers

https://www.qmachine.org/

by sktrdie • 13 years ago

41 16 13 years ago

norswap• 13 years ago

Example application? (excepted scientific computing)

jerf4• 13 years ago

Fun, probably. It's hard to imagine a workload in which this would be the truly best solution. Real supercomputers nowadays use immense intra-node bandwidth, and if you care about performance (and why are you using a supercomputer if you don't?), languages and environments that run around an order of magnitude faster than Javascript (on Javascript's best day) even before we talk about them running on a supercomputer environment, with the aforementioned bandwidth.

(Tack on another order of magnitude or two if we're talking about something like GPU computation, which I would not yet trust in WebGL, even ignoring the problem of bandwidth for the problem specification. If you work the math, it becomes difficult to overcome orders of magnitude in performance differences by throwing lots of slow resources at a problem, because you get to the point where it becomes impossible to make up the difference due to additional communication overheads.)

This basically limits this "supercomputer" to embarrassingly parallel problems that have very small specifications, for which performance is no particular concern, including the fact that one does not even know how much resources you will have for the problem on a second-by-second basis. This is not a large niche, but it can be fun.

wildermuthm• 13 years ago

What about using asm.js?

jonasalmeida2• 13 years ago

These are thoughtful comments, here's a couple more

his basically limits this "supercomputer" to embarrassingly parallel problems that have very small specifications

note support for map-reduce so it goes a step beyond "embarrassing" (map).

It's hard to imagine a workload in which this would be the truly best solution.

Biology offers a few examples - typically (alignment-free) sequence analysis is limited by memory, not by communication, so being able to reach a large number of volunteers may be more significant that the time it takes for each of them to communicate their piece of the problem. Here's an example: http://www.almob.org/content/7/1/12

wilkinson4• 13 years ago

languages and environments that run around an order of magnitude faster than Javascript (on Javascript's best day)

I'd love to see the programming language that's an order faster than Google V8. See http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php and play with it a little bit ;-)

ryandvm• 13 years ago

Bitcoin mining

wilkinson4• 13 years ago

Hello, this is Sean Wilkinson, the author of QMachine. I'm not sure what "excepted scientific computing" means, but there is an example study available at http://q.cgr.googlecode.com/hg/index.html, but it's probably going to fail if everyone on HN tries it because the data source (the NCBI) will probably crash ...

angersock• 13 years ago

Sean is a really great guy--glad to see he got something like this working!

jlebrech• 13 years ago

where are my QCoins?

jonasalmeida2• 13 years ago

:-D

wilkinson4• 13 years ago

Coming soon, if you'd like to help, actually :-)

cing• 13 years ago

A similar service: http://crowdprocess.com/

QMachine – a supercomputer made out of crowdsourced Web browsers

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