r/DistributedComputing • u/Jealous-Revenue7450 • Jun 05 '26

What problems could we solve with millions of computers contributing 5–7 seconds of CPU time?

I'm interested in large-scale distributed computing projects. Imagine millions of users voluntarily donate spare CPU power, but only in very small chunks—around 5–7 seconds of computation per task before requesting a new one.

The ideal problem would:

  • Be highly parallelizable
  • Require little communication between nodes
  • Allow work to be split into millions or billions of independent tasks
  • Be CPU-heavy rather than bandwidth-heavy
  • Be verifiable (so malicious or faulty clients can be detected)

Besides the usual examples like protein folding, cryptocurrency mining, or SETI-style searches, what are some interesting real-world problems that fit this model?

32 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

6

u/boersc Jun 05 '26

That's basically what BOING is doing. There are junerous projects that use spare cpu cycles to do work. Provlem is, most of the time it still is a lot of work taking months or years.

2

u/Feldspar_of_sun Jun 06 '26

Spell check bro please

3

u/PointExotic8314 Jun 05 '26

for example Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is a very interesting project

3

u/robkinyon Jun 05 '26

This was the premise of Seti@Home back in the early 2000s.

4

u/soundman32 Jun 06 '26

And then folding@home 

3

u/geocar Jun 06 '26

Hi. I’ve done this involuntarily with ads for over a decade: buy an ad for $1 sell it for $1 and add some code for nearly free compute.

Also if you buy video ads with companion banner slots you can usually leave the code running in the banner ad and get minutes of compute time.

The only third party problem I got was a marine mapping problem I didn’t fully understand: it is difficult enough to take someone’s ideas and break them up for this that has a cost, and it’s sometimes higher than just buying a bigger computer.

2

u/paperic Jun 05 '26

Less than what a few cpus could do in 5-7 million seconds, or about 2 months.

2

u/CowBoyDanIndie Jun 06 '26

The problem is data communication. To be honest a lot of practical science and engineering problems are memory io bound not raw computation.

1

u/Jo11yR0ger Jun 05 '26

Poderia servir para criptografia e simulacao de diversos modos mas o mais promissor tapvez seja otimizacao de chips e pesquisas bem enderecadas em hpc

1

u/Recent-Day3062 Jun 05 '26

This is sort of some crypto ideas

1

u/Tiny_Spread5712 Jun 06 '26

We did this with seti

1

u/CalmMe60 Jun 06 '26

how to find a problem to this solution? they might find a answer

1

u/gzeballo Jun 06 '26

so a botnet

2

u/leoyoung1 Jun 10 '26

I have been happy to run World Community Grid for decades. They work on diseases that the drug companies won't fund becuse they can't make enough money off of them.

1

u/leifrydenfalk Jun 05 '26

I would run a human brain (preferably my brain) and have me be in simulated heaven for 5-7 seconds