That reminds me about my fools day joke about MassiveClouding. I imagined about a company buying cpu/hours from regular desktop computer users and selling it to anyone interested in this kind of cpu power. Of course any computer software could be run on the MassiveClouding without any changes. My good imagination :) I don't know about the technology behind 80Legs but these 50000 computers might be a bot net.
"Any individual can become involved with SETI research by downloading the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software program, attaching to the SETI@home project, and allowing the program to run as a background process that uses idle computer power."
Yes it's something like it. There is another base difference; SETI@home or other folding projects have a centralized infrastructure for the data to be collected and bound. And all the software to be run on the client side are written for a specific mission. So every software should be rewritten for these platforms. My MassiveClouding dream has a some way of dissecting any software into parts and run on the clients. That's why it's a dream.
There may be a market for this. I know several people who run various types of folding just to be able to brag about the performance they get, and love to show off their stats. Getting paid for it would just be icing on the cake.
Of course, the pricing structure would be difficult, as would setting up the infrastructure for it. My (uniformed, by-the-seat-of-my-pants) best guess would be that subverting the current folding method of jobs would be the best way to do it. Accept jobs, send out to client computers, clients get paid based off of how many they complete. The problem arises from: sandboxing the jobs, to make sure they can't steal client info, and making it relatively easy to program jobs, while still allowing users to do various things to increase their performance (like using GPUs and the like).
I am relatively sure it couldn't be done as a startup. The profit margins just aren't there. My back of the envelope math says that each Work Unit, which, based off my experience takes ~8 hours to finish, would go for ~$0.80 (assuming that EC2 does a comparable speed, which isn't guaranteed). In order to make a decent profit, you'd have to be paying the users <$0.20 per unit, or roughly $0.60 per day, per core. It doesn't seem like a good enough proposition, that will barely cover the increased power consumption.
On the other hand, if an existing company branched out into this, something like Amazon and MTurk, I could see it working. A company which already has a user base, which has software installed on clients could leverage this as a "Oh yeah, here, we think this is cool, try it".
Sure, computing becomes a commodity and people / businesses will compete on "extras". Compute cycles and storage will be auctioned off in real-time depending on the buyers' need for and sellers' ability to provide data integrity, computational correctness guarantees, cycles/dollar, and a jurisdiction where the computation and data are legal.
