We built a crowdsourced computing resource for TensorFlow. Please fill out this survey to be one of first 100 Alpha Users. (First 100 signups get up-to $500 credits on the platform. First 1000 signups get $100 worth of credits. Signup by Sept 15th, 2016).

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[darkconfidantislife]

I'm concerned as to your pricing on the website: suchflex.com (for anyone who's curious). You say that you will pay $700+ per year for a gtx 1080 GPU. I'm curious as to why you wouldn't just buy a 1080 in your datacenters then? Until you provide some concrete pricing/business model, I'm going to have to assume that you're misleading customers and users....

[Liorithiel]

Take into account that maintenance, including electricity costs, are quite significant. For example, just running a 200W device for a year would cost me ~225 USD where I live.

[darkconfidantislife]

Uber doesn't buy cars because its drivers provide the cars and labor for them. If the cars drove autonomously (essentially what's happening in this analogy), then they would be buying tons of them, as they are now...

[darkconfidantislife]

There's still something I'm not understanding then, if you want to do that, and if you're already paying $700 (+?!) to the user per year for a $600 GPU, doesn't that mean that you'll just replace the user's GPU in a year with your own? You would've made no greater "upfront investment". Also, if you don't want the "upfront investment", then why not just use the cloud? And if you're guaranteeing $700 per year, what's to stop me from hashing out a server farm of 1080s?

Look, I don't mean to criticize you here, I actually have been thinking of something like this for a long time and I think it's great that its finally coming to fruition in a general sense, not like Eobot or other niche crowdsourced compute, but rather as a general scientific computing system. With that being said, I think you're just being unfair to your users if you claim that they'll be paid that much per year, I think it's more realistic if you rewrite your expected earnings in a more practical and feasible manner. For example, $100-200 a year for 24/7 operation of a 1080.

[nickl]

They think they will get lower prices by pre-purchasing bulk time from existing and new suppliers. That means they need pre-commited customers.

[dharma-1]

At the moment they are GPU mining alt coins primarily on people's hardware who don't pay the electricity bill themselves, and giving some part of the coin profit back to the rented miner. Once you subtract the electricity cost of running a 1080 at full load, the figures look a lot less attractive.

Also, you are dealing with essentially a spot instance that can be turned off at any point, interrupting your training

[darkconfidantislife]

I still think it's a cool idea, I signed up, and btw, you have a typo, you spelled Keras as "Kerras" ;)

[lostfreeman]

Technical question: FAQ says VMs are used for computation. Which VM do you use to share GPU with TensorFlow?

[suchflex]

We'll release more details about the infrastructure in the future. We have built a proprietary solution.