I’m dating myself, but back in the early days of the web, a service called SETI@home was pretty popular. In my own rudimentary description, it was a service that allowed you to contribute your own personal computer’s processing power to the search for extraterrestrial life at times when your machine was idle. Like when a screensaver kicked on.
Wow. SETI@home and screensavers. What is this… a center for ants? I mean, a post from 2009…?
Ahem. The service was popular because SETI needed compute and this was a unique way of engaging the general public in helping them with that need. My how times have changed.
Or haven’t.
You see with the growing compute needs driven by AI adoption and model development, we’re back to a point where everyone seems to be strained for computing resources. And unable to access them without a ton of investment — or some significant wheeling and dealing.
Enter CoCore, a side project that became a thing, from Devin Gaffney.
CoCore lets friends with spare compute lend it to friends who need it to create a more friendly cloud. Together, we put money spent on Big Cloud back in our own pockets. Join us in our experiment to put our wasted resources to good use.
- For Hosts: Turn idle compute into a valuable resource for your collaborators, and get a discount on your cloud bill.
- For Clients: Access cheaper, more flexible serverless resources across a broader diversity of machines.
- For Everyone: Take money out of Big Cloud’s markups, and share it with your friends. Also, we have pokes.
“Clearly, we’ve all been perfectly fine pouring money into Big Cloud and lighting half of it on fire for decades without any issue,” said Devin. “This is an experiment to try to see the shape of what a less wasteful and power-concentrating future could look like. Look, Portland is a great tech town because you can say ‘I want to create the galactic optimist-communist hypercloud where we all cooperate amongst ourselves to yeet margins from huge companies,’ and people here say, ‘That sounds neat, I’ll give it a spin.’ Is it a business? I don’t know! Seems like a fun thing to try doing.”
Sound interesting for your compute needs? Have compute bandwidth to spare? Now you see the Airbnb reference. And like Airbnb, you can get started today.
Oh. And CoCore is on Product Hunt today. If you’re into that sort of thing.
For more information, visit CoCore.
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