$1000 for making HTML5 supercomputing applications open source

$1000 for making HTML5 supercomputing applications open source(blog.crowdprocess.com)

17 points by pgfonseca 12 years ago | 14 comments

The CrowdProcess team are doing some really interesting stuff. Essentially, they're making distributed computing more readily available than it has ever been -- if you can write JavaScript, you can dive into distributed computing.

And with browsers advancing so rapidly, I'm really excited about what will be possible on this front in a couple of years time. Imagine being able to run computations on thousands of GPUs without having to distribute any software (think Folding@home, SETI@home, etc).

martinald 12 years ago |

Cool concept, but morally dubious. You're basically using people's electricity in the background without people knowing, not unlike bitcoin miner malware.

pgfonseca 12 years ago | |

The plan is to recover unused cycles, and ask the websites who power the platform to add a link to the opt in/out

https://ss.crowdprocess.com/opt-out.html

Having said that, I am the first to admit that many websites aren't currently displaying this, we need to work on that.

wldlyinaccurate 12 years ago | | |

It's extra work for website owners to build/test/maintain opt-out functionality. Have you considered offering a pre-built opt in/out widget which can be re-styled and integrated easily?

Or you could even just provide website owners with a "global opt-out" URL that they can stick in their footer.

plam 12 years ago | | |

It seems one of the biggest business issues is site visitor perception. I have a couple questions please.

What's your opt-rate rate so far out of the sites that have shown this option?

do you have any real data regarding hidden cost to a site visitor? like power consumption A/B testing or something?

martinald 12 years ago | | |

What do you mean? Unused cycles makes no sense. I'd be really annoyed if my laptop's battery life drops from 5 hours browsing the web to 1hour because it is running at 100% all the time due to this.

taumhn 12 years ago | |

Not to mention bandwidth which can in some cases be pretty expensive.

pgfonseca 12 years ago | | |

Currently blocking 3g and 4g (all mobile devices in fact), and working to block satellite internet.

consta 12 years ago |

Is there a deadline until you can submit ideas and their solutions?

pgfonseca 12 years ago | |

No deadline, but ideas have to be original, so first applications are the ones that count :)