idle CPU markets

With many high speed personal computers on the Internet and the 
deployment of low transaction cost Internet payment schemes, it seems 
inevitable that markets for idle CPU cycles and memory will develop.  An 
interesting problem is to try to predict who this market will benefit, 
and what the market will be used for.

So far it seems that cryptanalytic problems (e.g. factoring and brute 
forcing of keys) have the highest marginal value/MIPS among problems 
amenable to loosely coupled distributed computation.  However, I think it 
would be wasteful if the demand in idle CPU and memory markets were to be 
dominated by cryptanalysts since (non-academic) cryptanalysis is basicly 
a zero-sum game.  When a key is broken, no wealth is created, rather it 
is transfered from the owner of the key to the cryptanalyst.  

What other problems would benefit from easy access to lots of distributed 
CPU cycles?

Wei Dai

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 An entity calling itself "Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>" allegedly wrote:
>
> What other problems would benefit from easy access to lots of distributed 
> CPU cycles?


Well there are plenty of applications that want lots of cycles, but
there are several problems with the idle CPU market approach to getting
those cycles.



(Examples I can think of:  rendering of movie-quality graphics in
non-real-time, scientific computation/modelling, compiling...)


1.  Many such applications want their computation to be highly 
responsive--  the long turn-around involved in farming your task 
over a WAN is often prohibitive.  (E.g. real-time graphics.)

2.  Also many applications that need this kind of power are highly 
sensitive to inaccuracy or fraud.  A scientific modelling experiment 
which uses zillions of cycles can be rendered completely worthless 
if a tiny calculation that had been farmed to Joe Blow is done wrong 
or is lied about by Joe.

3.  Similarly, many such applications are highly confidential.


I'm sure some cypherpunks have good ideas on how to deal with
problems 3 and maybe 2...



Bryce

signatures follow


            "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."   
    <a href="http://ugrad-www.cs.colorado.edu/~wilcoxb/Niche.html">

                          bryce@colorado.edu                   </a>



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