Wasn't there an idea about 15 years ago where you would open your browser, go to a webpage and that page would have a JavaScript based client that would run distributed workloads?
I believe the idea was that people could submit big workloads, the server would slice them up and then have the clients download and run a small slice. You as the computer owner would then get some payout.
I used to work at Distributive (formerly "Kings Distributed Systems") on its DCP compute platform" which is entirely what you're describing. You can deploy a JS/WASM based workload, and it will be "sliced" and served to browser-based compute nodes. With WebGPU you can sort of have inference executing in the browser too. Incredible people there with an awesome project
I added Python execution support via Pyodide (cpython compiled to wasm) and worked on a bunch of other random stuff like WebLLM inferencing during my time there.
Apart from Distributive, there's also the "Golem network", "Salad", "Koii" and various other similar projects.
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I'm not sure if I'm convinced by the "Uber for compute" use case with compute buyers and compute workers (sellers), but if you're a university and you have 1000 Windows machines across all your computer labs, it'd be nice to leverage that compute for running research or something idk - especially with the price of ram / cloud offerings these days...
> but if you're a university and you have 1000 Windows machines across all your computer labs, it'd be nice to leverage that compute for running research or something idk - especially with the price of ram / cloud offerings these days...
This reminds me of the DevOps guy who made the developer laptops part of a Jenkins "swarm" under the thought that the machines were beefy and underutilized most of the time.
I believe the idea was that people could submit big workloads, the server would slice them up and then have the clients download and run a small slice. You as the computer owner would then get some payout.
Intersting to see this coming back again.