Vectordash is looking for individuals willing to rent out excess GPU horsepower (possibly from previous miners) for a cloud rendering service

[Skanky Sylveon]

https://bitcoinist.com/gpu-miners-may-soon-have-another-way-to-make-money/

Quote

Vectordash is looking to allow people with underpowered rigs not meant for gaming — such as Apple computers — to experience quality PC gaming with the help of individuals willing to rent their spare power for cloud rendering. This means that, in theory, even those with a Macbook Air could game at 4K resolution and 60 frames-per-second, given their internet bandwidth is capable of handling that amount of data.

I decided to bold and color a rather relevant sentence in my opinion.  Many US citizens don't have the required internet speeds in order to take advantage of such a service, and even then, internet speeds are a rather inconsistent beast, especially if you have faimly that may be watching videos or playing games themselves at the same time.

 

But rather obvious concerns aside, let's talk about the main headline of the article, that cryptocurrency miners may have another revenue source.  I think that the biggest concerns with such a statement is that whether or not GPUs will become scarce again, while people are grabbing them up to make a quick profit.  I doubt it, while existing miners may take advantage of this offer (those who didn't just immediately sell their stock due to most miners being concerned about short term profits only) I don't see people pulling the trigger on this as much due to.

 

1: This being more of a business partnership thus a lack of control on what the owners of said GPUs can do.

 

2: The lack of evidence that there is a strong market for GPU rendering services. 

 

3: The fact that customers are involved, once you start serving others, it becomes an entirely different matter.  A bunch of clients get frustrated because you have poor ping because you are using satellite internet?  Vectordash will probably cut you off.

 

4: This is somewhat of a branch of number 3, but the GPU owners must have very good internet, at least the ones who have several hundred GPUs from mining. 

 

Let's take me for example. 

 

Ping is rather good, download speeds are good, upload speeds are ok, a bit lacking, but my property is business/residential, meaning I can get business service for around 150 a month (which would match my upload speeds with my download speeds), more then twice what I'm paying for currently, but let's see how much Vectordash is paying those who rent out their GPUs.

Quote

On the other side of the deal, GPU renters stand to make about $0.60 per day 

That equates to 18 dollars and 60 cents a month, if said month is 31 days.  I am assuming that goes by per GPU, if that's the csse, I would need 9 GPUs to just about break even 167 dollars and 40 cents, and even then I would need to equate the power consumption that I would need to pay.  Furthermore, these services tend to be full blown systems, so you would probably need a beefy enough CPU to virtualize that many desktops, which most miners probably dont have.  Mining isn't exactly CPU intensive, and that's assuming that they have the luxury of decent internet, it's quite possible that they do not.

 

So rant aside, I find the title rather silly, so I changed it.  To be fair, Vectordash is thinking outside of the box, and the possibility of renting out old hardware would be a nice way to make a few bucks, but I don't see this gaining too much traction.  I don't find these computer streaming rental services catching on in general actually, but maybe I'm wrong. 

[Sauron]

I agree it sound like a really silly idea... unless they know something we don't, this doesn't look to be profitable for the GPU owners and it's unlikely to work as intended.

[poochyena]

Thats a cool idea if I understand that correctly. I have a gaming PC that I only use for heavy tasks ~2 hours a day. If I could rent out 90% of my computer power for ~22 hours a day, that'll be sweet.

 

35 minutes ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

Many US citizens don't have the required internet speeds in order to take advantage of such a service, and even then, internet speeds are a rather inconsistent beast

meh, internet isn't too bad in the US any more. Plenty of people like me with 100mb/s internet with low ping for ~$50/month or less

 

40 minutes ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

GPU renters stand to make about $0.60 per day 

Thats kinda bad. Wonder how much power would cost for the day.

[Glenwing]

For a GPU that uses 200 W, that's 4.8 kWh per day if run 24/7. At $0.60 per day, it would cost more in electricity if your rate is more than 12.5 cents/kWh, and that's just the GPU alone. Including the rest of the system, your electricity rates would have to be quite low just to break even. I can't see this being attractive to anyone unless the pay rate is at least doubled, if not tripled, otherwise it will only appeal to people who have so much solar power they can't use it all.

[Fetzie]

10 minutes ago, Glenwing said:

For a GPU that uses 200 W, that's 4.8 kWh per day if run 24/7. At $0.60 per day, it would cost more in electricity if your rate is more than 12.5 cents/kWh, and that's just the GPU alone. Including the rest of the system, your electricity rates would have to be quite low just to break even. I can't see this being attractive to anyone unless the pay rate is at least doubled, if not tripled, otherwise it will only appeal to people to have so much solar power they can't use it all.

So unless you are paying Canadian-style rates (https://www.torontohydro.com/sites/electricsystem/residential/rates/Pages/resirates.aspx#tab2) you'll be lucky to break even. Which is presumably why this service wants to out-source the processing power to somebody else, because otherwise they would be losing money on the venture.

[abharga2]

8 hours ago, Skanky Sylveon said:

https://bitcoinist.com/gpu-miners-may-soon-have-another-way-to-make-money/

I decided to bold and color a rather relevant sentence in my opinion.  Many US citizens don't have the required internet speeds in order to take advantage of such a service, and even then, internet speeds are a rather inconsistent beast, especially if you have faimly that may be watching videos or playing games themselves at the same time.

 

But rather obvious concerns aside, let's talk about the main headline of the article, that cryptocurrency miners may have another revenue source.  I think that the biggest concerns with such a statement is that whether or not GPUs will become scarce again, while people are grabbing them up to make a quick profit.  I doubt it, while existing miners may take advantage of this offer (those who didn't just immediately sell their stock due to most miners being concerned about short term profits only) I don't see people pulling the trigger on this as much due to.

 

1: This being more of a business partnership thus a lack of control on what the owners of said GPUs can do.

 

2: The lack of evidence that there is a strong market for GPU rendering services. 

 

3: The fact that customers are involved, once you start serving others, it becomes an entirely different matter.  A bunch of clients get frustrated because you have poor ping because you are using satellite internet?  Vectordash will probably cut you off.

 

4: This is somewhat of a branch of number 3, but the GPU owners must have very good internet, at least the ones who have several hundred GPUs from mining. 

 

Let's take me for example. 

 

Ping is rather good, download speeds are good, upload speeds are ok, a bit lacking, but my property is business/residential, meaning I can get business service for around 150 a month (which would match my upload speeds with my download speeds), more then twice what I'm paying for currently, but let's see how much Vectordash is paying those who rent out their GPUs.

That equates to 18 dollars and 60 cents a month, if said month is 31 days.  I am assuming that goes by per GPU, if that's the csse, I would need 9 GPUs to just about break even 167 dollars and 40 cents, and even then I would need to equate the power consumption that I would need to pay.  Furthermore, these services tend to be full blown systems, so you would probably need a beefy enough CPU to virtualize that many desktops, which most miners probably dont have.  Mining isn't exactly CPU intensive, and that's assuming that they have the luxury of decent internet, it's quite possible that they do not.

 

So rant aside, I find the title rather silly, so I changed it.  To be fair, Vectordash is thinking outside of the box, and the possibility of renting out old hardware would be a nice way to make a few bucks, but I don't see this gaining too much traction.  I don't find these computer streaming rental services catching on in general actually, but maybe I'm wrong. 

Hey guys! I'm Abhishek, one of the cofounders of Vectordash and I wanted to respond to this just to clarify a couple things.

 

First, the owners of the GPUs have full flexibility over what they do with the GPUs. People can also take their machines offline whenever they want, as long as there isn't an active stream.

 

I would argue that there is a massive market for GPU rendering services, especially a distributed model where we can deliver much lower latency than similar providers. This makes it easy for gamers to circumvent the large upfront cost of building a gaming PC, and instead pay a small fee for a monthly subscription.

 

We do "quality of life" checks for the client to make sure the client has reasonable download speeds and pings, and we also measure pings before the stream starts, so if the client connects to your machine, they will most likely have a good experience.

 

Finally, the payout quoted in the bitcoinist article is actually incorrect. We're planning to pay out between $60-$105 / GPU / month depending on utilization. 

 

Hope this is helpful, and would love any feedback! Cheers :)

[williamcll]

I think you still make more money selling GPUs secondhand considering the current generation of GPUs have been expensive.

[Skanky Sylveon]

2 hours ago, abharga2 said:

Hey guys! I'm Abhishek, one of the cofounders of Vectordash and I wanted to respond to this just to clarify a couple things.

Hello Abhishek.  I'm glad that you decided to make an account to clarify a few things. 

First off, welcome to the fourms!  And second, some of your answers raised a few questions that I would like you to awnser for me if you can.

2 hours ago, abharga2 said:

First, the owners of the GPUs have full flexibility over what they do with the GPUs. People can also take their machines offline whenever they want, as long as there isn't an active stream.

Will the hardware owners in question know if there is an active stream or not?  I could see that definitely being a potential problem if someone turns off a machine unknowingly while a stream is happening. 

2 hours ago, abharga2 said:

especially a distributed model where we can deliver much lower latency than similar providers. 

So your company's plan is to rent hardware throughout the United states,  instead of having all of the hardware in a centralized location, then connect said hardware to clients within a relatively close proximity?

 

That would definitely help with overall ping.  The closer the connection is, the better.  For the most part. 

2 hours ago, abharga2 said:

Finally, the payout quoted in the bitcoinist article is actually incorrect. We're planning to pay out between $60-$105 / GPU / month depending on utilization. 

That's definitely better, a minimum of 2 dollars a month is much more reasonable.  How is the pay calculated?  Is it by hardware?  Client use?  Or some other factor?  Is an entire system needed, so CPU, motherboard, RAM, etc?

 

I'm asking that last question because the bitcoinist stated that miners could use their old GPUs that was used for mining as a part of your GPU rendering service.  The only issue with that is most mining setups are quite different from most gaming rigs.  Mining setups tend to have many GPUs hooked up to a single motherboard via PCIe x1 or even USB connections, all running off a low power, relatively low performance CPU.  Meaning that a mining setup wouldn't necessarily make a good gaming setup. 

 

Thanks again, and I look forward to hearing your reply. 

[Trik'Stari]

It's almost as if remotely located hardware streaming games to your home is a stupid idea.

[schwellmo92]

17 hours ago, poochyena said:

meh, internet isn't too bad in the US any more. Plenty of people like me with 100mb/s internet with low ping for ~$50/month or less

100Mbps down? No problem! 100Mbps up? Problem...

[Neftex]

anyone thought of hackers renting gpus like this to crack passwords?

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, Neftex said:

anyone thought of hackers renting gpus like this to crack passwords?

Sure but hackers can already rent datacentre space (including with GPU compute power) if they want to. The service will still be liable for the actions of the users - so if a user manages to somehow use the GPU power for something illegal, the service will need to be able to identify and stop that, or face liability.

[bcredeur97]

19 hours ago, Glenwing said:

For a GPU that uses 200 W, that's 4.8 kWh per day if run 24/7. At $0.60 per day, it would cost more in electricity if your rate is more than 12.5 cents/kWh, and that's just the GPU alone. Including the rest of the system, your electricity rates would have to be quite low just to break even. I can't see this being attractive to anyone unless the pay rate is at least doubled, if not tripled, otherwise it will only appeal to people who have so much solar power they can't use it all.

not to mention for large farms, this is even further unprofitable due to needing a full X16 (or at least an X8) lane for each GPU. Currently the only cheap way to do it uses only an X1 lane for each GPU, which is cheap and fine for mining, not fine for other workloads.

 

Getting server boards with enough X16 slots that actually have processor backing them which is what you need for good performance, cost waaaaay too much money still.

[Trik'Stari]

7 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

kinda curious if such "solutions" are running in countries with ungodly internet speeds and latencies actually o_o

I seriously doubt it. No one is going to enjoy the lag from that.

 

Regardless of what internet speeds you have, multiplayer will likely not be enjoyable for anyone more than a few miles from the game server.

[trag1c]

Now if they let me pay for pure computational power i would be for it. Something like baking normal maps or rendering in applications like blender cycles or maya can be quite time consuming off loading it to an external network while keep my machine free for me to work on would be wicked and probably pretty cost effective for a half decen render farm would cost me.

 

That eliminates the latency issue as well since its not a real time computation.

[yolosnail]

I wonder how much I could rent out my GT120 for!