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Sentient claims to have assembled machine-learning muscle to rival Google by rounding up idle computers.
Recent improvements in speech and image recognition have come as companies such as Google build bigger, more powerful systems of computers to run machine-learning software. Now a relative minnow, a private company called Sentient with only about 70 employees, says it can cheaply assemble even larger computing systems to power artificial-intelligence software.
The company's approach may not be suited to all types of machine learning, a technology that has uses as varied as facial recognition and financial trading. Sentient has not published details, but says it has shown that it can put together enough computing power to produce significant results in some cases.
Sentient's power comes from linking up hundreds of thousands of computers over the Internet to work together as if they were a single machine. The company won't say exactly where all the machines it taps into are. But many are idle inside data centers, the warehouse-like facilities that power Internet services such as websites and mobile apps, says Babak Hodjat, cofounder and chief scientist at Sentient. The company pays a data-center operator to make use of its spare machines.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:21AM
I guess SN hosts won't be enrolled in, 'cause they aren't idle ever.
(or are they? currently, this story and about other 3 are with 0 comments)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:38AM
Don't believe the comment count shown on the front page. Still a few bugs lurking.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:43AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:36AM
I've participated in at least 4 of these volunteer networks of excess computer power over the years. Always for free.
Now they are going to take the excess processors in server farms and use them for all those compute intensive jobs in desperate need of processing power.
Oh wait, there are no such pressing needs. If someone else doesn't pay the power bill and contribute expensive investments in equipment, for free, none of these compute heavy jobs are worth doing, and they all disappear.
Now these guys (who all seem to share the same white board) are going to do this by PAYING companies for excess processor time to solve these *cough* (non-existent) compute heavy tasks, and other things. Lets see, what were those other thing.... Oh yeah facial recognition.
Who do you suppose the customer is for that job? Who is going to pay that bill?
Thanks a lot guys. Rip off the tax payer to help strip them of their last shred of privacy.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:47AM
My friend Luke Crawford - no obvious relation - tells me that the major cost center for his hosting service is electric power. That is were he to colo a server for me, most of the monthly price would be to pay the power bill. It's not just the power consumed by the server, but the power consumed by the data center's cooling, as well as the cost of equipping the data center with all that cooling equipment.
Conserving energy through hardware design is of course a well-studied problem. There are some others who are looking into conserving power through source code refactoring but there aren't many such researchers. I haven't found much in the way of published results.
In general but not always making your software use less power will make it run faster - stuff like reducing cache misses.
While yes there is quite a lot of value to using idle compute cycles for an AI server, that's going to make your server use more power. The prices that Luke charges for his hosting are based on the average power consumption for a typical web server load. I can see from my logs that my load varies depending on the day of the week as well as the hour of the day. Suppose I sold the idle cycles to these AI people - I'd be costing Luke some money.
In the long run the data center operators will figure out what's going on and will charge for the increased power consumption.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:53AM
Typically web hosters impose limits on the processor power you can use. I guess those AI contracts are not just normal web hosting contracts, but specific contracts that explicitly cover this use case. And the prices to be paid for that surely reflect the true cost.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 03 2015, @11:08AM
An AI, built from the unused, surplus, unwanted cycles of data centers? Is it not obvious that this is the gate way to the apocalypse? What kind of attitude will such an AI have to the beings that "allowed" it to come into existence? We'll be lucky to get away with just Terminators, if this goes forward!!
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Wednesday June 03 2015, @02:11PM
Some years ago when Seti@Home and similar were just starting this made sense. Now power is more expensive and computers do all sorts of things like put parts to sleep, slow down the clock, etc... Running something like this means the computer is always running at 100%. It consumes more electricity, generates more heat and wears out faster. The concept of 'wasted' cycles really doesn't apply anymore.
So.. either they have to pay the datacenters enough money to justify that added expense.. in which case they might as well just be paying for regular computer time. Or... the datacenters would be actually losing out by participating in this.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:21AM
Some years ago when Seti@Home and similar were just starting this made sense.
Well, Like I said above, it never made sense unless someone else was paying the bill.
I ran Seti too. And that was before efficient processors came around. And with those inefficient processors, we had inefficient network cards, disk drives, memory, sound cards, and Cathode Ray Tube Monitors.
At the time I was in Alaska and the installation paid a heating bill just about year around, so if the machines were busy at night and kicked out heat, that was really not an issue.
But now, If you took a boat load of Raspberry Pi' and hooked them up to an efficient power supply they could crank all day on what we spent just spinning hard drives.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @12:46AM
I read the title as "A Supercomputer Bully Tapping Data Warehouses for Their Idle Computing Power"