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'Massive' Startup Wants To Rent Your Spare Compute Power To Pay For Apps (techcrunch.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the distributed-compute-power dept.
What if users could pay for apps or services not with money or attention, but with their spare compute power? A startup called "Massive" is working to take this concept "into the modern world as an alternative to charging users or pounding them with advertisements to generate revenue," writes TechCrunch's Alex Wilhelm. From the report: Massive announced an $11 million round this morning, led by Point72 Ventures with participation from crypto-themed entities, including CoinShares Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Several angels also participated in the funding event. The model is interesting, and Massive's funding round is an indication that it has found some market traction. So, we get the company on the horn to learn more.

Massive co-founder and CEO Jason Grad described the startup's work as something akin to an Airbnb or Turo for users' computers, comparing its service to some of the more popular consumer-sharing startups that folks already know. It's a reasonable comparison. Some 50,000 desktop computer users -- nodes, in the company's parlance -- have opted into its service. Which is white hat, it goes without saying. Given that Massive is asking for compute power, it will have constant work to do to ensure that it is a good steward of user trust and partner selection; no one wants their spare CPU cycles to go to something illegal. The company has a good early stance toward caring for its nascent compute exchange, with a hard requirement of getting users to opt into its service before joining.

To start, Massive is working with crypto-focused companies. They have an obvious need for compute power, and the work they execute -- running blockchain calculations -- is monetized through block rewards and other fees, making them easy choices for partnerships. You can now see why the company's investor list includes a number of crypto-focused venture capital firms. The startup's goal is broader, however. It wants to build a two-sided marketplace for compute power, Grad explained. That means lots more users offering up a slice of their computing power, future acceptance of mobile devices, and a broader partner list. Part of the company's perspective is rooted in the belief that the dominant business models of the internet today are lacking. "Shit," to quote Grad directly.
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'Massive' Startup Wants To Rent Your Spare Compute Power To Pay For Apps More

'Massive' Startup Wants To Rent Your Spare Compute Power To Pay For Apps

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  • Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those (Score:5, Informative)

    by torklugnutz ( 212328 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @07:54PM (#62035081) Homepage

    Sounds like SETI at home.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 )
      What happens to the poor sap who doesn't own the CPU but who foots the power bill? Think business owners, universities, public spaces, and hotels? Do they get any rights to the money produced by their power? What about parents? Or room-mates who pay a flat fee? Can I dump a server farm in my office and mooch off one employer to the next?

    • Sounds like SETI at home.

      More like "SETI at work".

      Why use my electricity when my employer can pay?

    • Re: Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those (Score:4, Informative)

      by getuid() ( 1305889 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @01:50AM (#62035529)

      In their excuse, SETI was started in the '90s, when an i486 or a Pentium would essentially just uselessly burn perfectly good cycles when not doing useful work. Today, the difference between an idle CPU and busy one is easily one order of magnitude of power.

      And don't even get me started in GPUs, cooling rigs etc that also consume power mostly on a need-to-deliver basis.

      Take-away message: idle CPU is better left idle in between work sprints, unless you're a server farm and your business is actually renting out CPU time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        In their excuse, SETI was started in the '90s, when an i486 or a Pentium would essentially just uselessly burn perfectly good cycles when not doing useful work. Today, the difference between an idle CPU and busy one is easily one order of magnitude of power.

        That was not the fault of the 486 or the Pentium processor. The 486 and Pentium processors can go into lower power modes where they stop executing code and wait for an interrupt.

        The fault was the fact that the dominant OS of the time was wasteful of cycl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Even back in the 90s there was a significant difference between a CPU running NOPs or a tight loop that fit entirely in cache, and a CPU doing mathematical calculations. In the former cases the FPU and most of the ALU would be idle, and the memory controller doing little more than issuing DRAM refresh cycles.

        There's no such thing as a free CPU cycle. Even if you used something like solar power, that energy could be reducing emissions somewhere.

        People used to justify it by saying that the computer was acting

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vyvepe ( 809573 )

          People used to justify it by saying that the computer was acting as a space heater. Of course it would be more efficient if it wasn't doing the calculations and was just a resistive heating element, and even back then we had heat pumps.

          Spending electricity to make heat with a computer or with a resistive heating element is exactly the same level of efficiency. Assuming you already own a computer and a heating element. Otherwise a heating element is of course cheaper. Heat pumps were rare. Even in 2000 it was common to use resistive heating elements to heat homes in USA.

          It is rather misleading to claim that there was a significant difference between CPU running NOPs and some computations. 486DX4-100 had maximum power consumption of 7.5 W.

    • Sounds like SETI at home.

      No, SETI at home and all of the results it produced is far more valuable than crypto/blockchain.

    • man seti at home used to be so god damn cool, too. that screensaver mode where it showed you 3d data charts that meant absolutely nothing to you.

  • nothing is going to go wrong here... lol (Score:5, Insightful)

    by haus ( 129916 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @08:02PM (#62035105) Journal

    Let's see, granting access to your systems to run random code on behalf of undisclosed companies that are dependent upon the rise and fall of cryptocurrency markets.

    Good luck with that.

    • Let's see, granting access to your systems to run random code on behalf of undisclosed companies that are dependent upon the rise and fall of cryptocurrency markets. ... Good luck with that.

      What's that old saying (associated with P. T. Barnum), "There's a sucker born every minute."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        It's up to the startup to figure out how to do that safely. Cloud providers have obviously figured that out already since they need to run untrusted code too, and there are a lot more of them much smaller than AWS. I'm going to say a virtual machine of some kind will be involved.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      well, this:

      it goes without saying. Given that Massive is asking for compute power, it will have constant work to do to ensure that it is a good steward of user trust and partner selection; no one wants their spare CPU cycles to go to something illegal. The company has a good early stance toward caring for its nascent compute exchange, with a hard requirement of blablabla ...

      ... is a huge red flag.

      red as in neon alarm blinking in your face.

      yet don't underestimate the hordes willing to fall for it. these vultures might even be onto something.

  • How stupid do you have to be to get a âoefreeâ app in exchange for an energy bill debt worth hundreds of dollars. You canâ(TM)t make this kind of stupidity up. If people are actually doing it â¦
    • Also, when will Slashdot fix their character encoding ⦠I am sick of all my comments from Apple devices coming through with ridiculous characters.

    • Clearly, energy bill is just the start.

      And hardware being priced up (or priced out and unavailable) on account of being usable to mine bitcoin is NOT THE END.
      E.g. What's to stop energy providers from profiling households and deciding that some of them may be mining bitcoin, so they should be charged as commercial enterprises and not as home consumers?
      Or how about ISPs? Why should they not take a piece of that pie? After all, can't bitcoin without bps.

      And let's not even start with the effect those fake sudok

      • E.g. What's to stop energy providers from profiling households and deciding that some of them may be mining bitcoin, so they should be charged as commercial enterprises and not as home consumers?

        Commercial enterprises pay lower rates than residential.

        • Then hopefully all these teens are using their work computers haha

        • Charging residential customers as commercial would be a three-step process which would first siphon the source of the subsidy from the system, creating an imbalance of pricing among residential customers, followed by raising the cost to all customers, followed by investigations and legislature limiting the cost for commercial enterprises with lobbying powers - and a lot of money missing.
          Resulting in, at best, raised costs for the residential consumers. At worst, in a collapsed energy system.

          Residential cost

    • Hundreds of dollars? Let's check to see.

      Let's assume the worst-case scenario. You run their app 24x7. The app pegs your CPU all the time. You wouldn't otherwise be using the CPU at all, it would be completely idle.

      A typical Intel laptop CPU TDP is about 12 watts at idle. About 28 watts TDP when pegged 100%. So a difference of 16 watts between totally idle and max CPU.

      If you use the app 24/7, that's about $1.05/month with US electricity prices. $2.40 in California.

      Very worst case about $1/month, if you ne

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Ksevio ( 865461 )

        Though if you have a desktop CPU, you might be using 200W more which would be around 144kW or $25/month. Probably not worth it

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by fazig ( 2909523 )
        My 3900X can pull ~150W alone when under full load all day at factory settings (well at least with the cooling that I provide, which also eats a bit more to keep the CPU around 80C)

        Given the energy prices around here where you pay a whopping (and that's still relatively low for Germany) ~.31€/kWh, that would be ~1.17€ per day, ~33.48€ per (30 day) month, ~407.34€ per year.


        Yeah, all that decentralization argumentation for crypto-currency PoW vs PoS is bullshit, because PoW naturally

  • "Given that Massive is asking for compute power, it will have constant work to do to ensure that it is a good steward of user trust and partner selection; no one wants their spare CPU cycles to go to something illegal."

    Honestly, my biggest concern wouldn't be their choice of clientele... it'd be how good Massive's coders are. If they can't write good, secure code, they'll be leaving the end users' computers wide open to attack.

  • The cost of electrical power is a significant part of the cost of computation. 100W of extra power consumption is ~900KWH/ year, at $0.30/KWH its $270/year. But some computers use a lot more than that, my gaming computer at home will draw several hundred extra watts when used hard. This can start to approach $1K/year, especially if it moves your consumption into a higher cost bracket.

    The numbers are a lot lower if you turn off your computer when not in use, but can still add up - I'd guess a typical c

    • at $0.30/KWH its $270/year.

      Where do you pay $0.30 / kwh? Hawaii?

    • Is the real cost here. A lot of people would just use a work computer for that and essentially use up company resources to mine bitcoin. To get anything close to normal ad revenue they'd need to mine a lot. That means more wasted energy on this ponzi scheme [unicamp.br],

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by lu-darp ( 469705 )

        This. However it need not cost the environment if you compute thoughtfully. I contribute to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and GPUGrid (doing actual work for humanity) in winter only. With 2 quiet PCs this combined ~700 W of "smart" heating (one directly under my desk) offsets the only other heat source in my office - a "dumb" electric heater.

  • want my cpu cycles doing something legal like wasting power

  • I can see how this might work in theory(which puts it above some startup VC nose candy nonsense); but the viable area seems sufficiently narrow and exotic that I'm skeptical of how they are planning to commercialize it.

    'Crypto' may be a natural partner in the sense that it has a bottomless appetite for cheap compute; but the portion of assorted variants where CPUs are something other than a joke is a lot smaller than the field as a whole; and excludes some of the more prominent ones. That means some combination of user CPU time being worth a lot less; this outfit having a much smaller pool of potential partners who might actually pay something for CPU time; or needing to start asking technical questions about people's GPUs and potentially confining yourself to people with discrete or fairly leading edge integrated graphics(and even that won't save the ASIC-mined stuff).

    Then there's the problem that(unlike the heyday of SETI@Home) contemporary computers are absolutely loaded with automated frequency and voltage adjustment and dynamic fan speeds and similar that make their energy use, temperature(internal and external), noise level; and sometime lifespan sharply dependent on how much load they are under. It's also not uncommon, especially in the cheap seats or the more optimistic ultraportables, to find gear that was never really designed to endure the thermal load imposed by its alleged maximum power; and goes full hair-dryer mode if you don't stick to fairly casual stuff that leaves it with plenty of idle time. Even if you don't pay for the electricity; you'll probably notice the noise, the lap burns; the need to clean the fans every 100 hours, etc.

    And finally there's the competition from the various 'cloud' guys whose prices effectively cap what an outfit like this could possibly command for the compute time they are selling: Unless it's cheaper than an EC2 spot instance, potentially a fair bit cheaper, why am I going to bother tailoring my workload for a possibly-adversarial computer with absolutely no uptime guarantees?

    That just seems like a very, very, tight squeeze: the demand of 'crypto' for general purpose compute is actually markedly lower than its demand for specialist compute aimed at whatever flavor of makework it is based on; modern power management means that there's a lot less 'spare' computing power: the chips are good for more operations; but the number of places where the difference between idle and loaded won't annoy someone is far lower than it used to be; and finally you've got the professionals already trying to sell similar services; but provided by actual datacenters; so you are going nowhere unless you undercut them, which means that your prices are going to be pretty low indeed.

    Am I missing some cause for optimism here?

    • I got 2 comments about this :

      1) If this is mostly about crypto currently, why should I provide my spare computing resources when I can mine crypto directly, cutting out the middle man (them)? Unless they offering bonus cash to get people to sign up, which will make it more valuable then just mining crypto directly (till they run out of investor's cash).

      2) What makes them different from all the cloud providers, with many of them being very good at providing HPC when needed.
      You hear more and more stories such

  • My "spare" computer power is pretty much nonexistent these days where CPUs and GPUs actually adjust their power consumption to the workload they are supposed to do. What they say here is essentially "how about using your spare engine power when you're rolling downhill by revving up your engine to the max regardless"?

  • "Pay for apps" is a huge red flag.

  • 'Compute power' doesn't grow on trees, it's paid for with your electric bill -- or someones' electric bill. It's not free. They may as well just ask for payment in cryptocurrency, it amounts to the same thing in the end.

  • This is going to be a great way for kids buy things without their parents knowing about it, while getting their parents to still pay for it via the electric bill.

    This is easily a 20x valuation startup, like every app for kids with a focus on hiding things from their parents.

  • What if people could choose not to pay for apps or services at all, not with money or attention or personal information or even spare computer power.

    Imagine if all they had to do was download and install an app, then use it for as long as they liked, for whatever purpose they liked.

    Then imagine that they could also download the source code for these apps and modify them to suit their particular needs (or get someone else to do that for them - as a favour or as paid labour), and then have the right to share

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