80legs Web-Scale Apps Competition

http://www.challengepost.com/challenge/80legs-web-scale-apps-competition

by jdrock • 17 years ago

21 12 17 years ago

vicaya2• 17 years ago

Instead of a thinly veiled advertisement, how about some information on the capability of the hardware: histograms of RAM size, hard drives, CPU units (equivalents of some known CPU) and network speed/latency for these "50,000" machines?

Without a reasonable description of hardware, any ideas would be just hand waving.

jdrock5• 17 years ago

The 50,000+ computers come from a distributed grid computing system that's similar to a commercial opt-in SETI@home.

Because of that, we don't know exact specs on the computers, but here are the limitations that 80Apps have: http://80legs.pbworks.com/80Apps#LimitationsonYourCode

vicaya2• 17 years ago

Well, do you have something like this?:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/top_hosts.php

BTW, how do you ensure somebody is not submitting a malware (intentional or not) that can DDoS someone by crawling the same host at pretty much the same time?

dotBen2• 17 years ago

The problem is that 80legs works to a trojan/malware type model - the runtime is installed as a background service on apps like Digsby.

It's fair to say that many people who are using these apps don't know that their machine is being given tasks to work on in the background.

Aside from the unknown bandwidth/cpu/throughput unknowns IMHO there is an ethical question of using this software. From what I can see there is no opt-out other than not to install the software the runtime is bundled with. And that assumes you even know it's being installed.

jdrock5• 17 years ago

Actually all Digsby users are told up-front during the install process about Plura. And you can easily turn off Plura from Digsby.

ramanujan• 17 years ago

It seems a lot like SETI@Home or the Google Toolbar, or really anything that sends back "anonymized data" or compute cycles.

jlees• 17 years ago

I'd love to enter this if it wasn't just Java. I understand why, but it's still an unfortunate hurdle!

elcron• 17 years ago

Where does it say java? Afaik you can use any language that compiles to the jvm so languages that compile to it (e.g clojure) are fine. Not as much choice, but better than just java.

jdrock5• 17 years ago

We're exploring the use of other languages that work in the JVM, but for now it's just Java.

The problem with other languages is that they all make use of reflection to get themselves working, which Plura's security sandbox does not allow. If anyone knows a way around this, please share!

80legs Web-Scale Apps Competition

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