Renting out CPU or GPU Power for AI or scientific research?

[WeTuLo707]

Has anyone tried renting out their CPU or GPU (not talking crypto-mining) for AI or scientific research?

 

Have you made any returns on it?

 

Did you see an increase in your power bill?

 

Do you know of any legit companies that do it?

 

Thanks.

[emosun]

you can DONOTE to folding at home , but otherwise unless you have several server racks worth of power at hand not many people are willing top pay money for that

[WeTuLo707]

23 minutes ago, emosun said:

you can DONOTE to folding at home , but otherwise unless you have several server racks worth of power at hand not many people are willing top pay money for that

I have heard of that, but I have also seen many different companies, Hyperlink, TensorDock, Vast.ai, etc that allow you to rent out your CPU/GPU. I got enough systems lying around where I could easily make a few servers.

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, WeTuLo707 said:

I have heard of that, but I have also seen many different companies, Hyperlink, TensorDock, Vast.ai, etc that allow you to rent out your CPU/GPU. I got enough systems lying around where I could easily make a few servers.

Problem is, residential electricity rates are a lot higher than a big data centre - so its not really economically viable for someone to rent off an individual.  Are you also factoring in wear and tear on the hardware, cooling the room they are in, etc.  Are they even powerful enough to be of value given older cards will have worse performance per watt?

There's also the security issue of letting some random third party connect to a PC at your home.  Sure you can stick those machines on a private subnet, but if you ever plan to use them again yourself you want to be sure they're clean.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, WeTuLo707 said:

I have heard of that, but I have also seen many different companies, Hyperlink, TensorDock, Vast.ai, etc that allow you to rent out your CPU/GPU. I got enough systems lying around where I could easily make a few servers.

They are also trusted and registered business with good customer web portals to purchase and pay for those services. Without a lot of effort you're going to have none of that meaning nobody would actually trust you and be willing to pay for anything.

 

Folding@Home and BOINC are the services for this situation and that is (typically, almost always) freely donated computer resources (CPU & GPU). If you want to put your hardware to good use then install either of those and run them, you will not get paid but at least your hardware is doing something if that is what you mostly want out of it. It is however expensive, there is a huge cost difference between a PC being on but mostly not doing anything and being 100% utilized 24/7.

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Are they even powerful enough to be of value given older cards will have worse performance per watt?

And may not even have hardware feature support for what people want e.g. Tensor Cores.

[m9x3mos]

13 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Problem is, residential electricity rates are a lot higher than a big data centre - so its not really economically viable for someone to rent off an individual.  Are you also factoring in wear and tear on the hardware, cooling the room they are in, etc.  Are they even powerful enough to be of value given older cards will have worse performance per watt?

There's also the security issue of letting some random third party connect to a PC at your home.  Sure you can stick those machines on a private subnet, but if you ever plan to use them again yourself you want to be sure they're clean.

Yeah, the last time I saw an article about this, the rates that were being paid weren't even enough to cover the energy costs to run it with the rates I am charged at home let alone earn profit. 

 

[WeTuLo707]

Thank you all for the input on this. There are so many scams/nonsense out there these days.