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This pattern has been implemented across hundreds if not thousands of different organizations (and between organizations). I have a patent on data distribution strategies from my time at Google running a large (>1M cores 24/7 for 3 years) idle cycle harvesting project.

it's a good idea but you often end up with huge tail latencies, slight incompatibilities due to fleet heterogeneity, and a database/scheduler management problem.

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My university ran its render farm across idle workstations using the screensaver back in early 2000. Same concept.
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And Apple has had simple distributed video encoding since 2005, so yes it is not new in computing, but it is still useful for the gap before a given task can fit comfortably on one machine
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Psst, it is "innovative". /s
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It is if it’s GPU compute.
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Distributed GPU compute has existed for quite some time,

https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect

And this is because I can't be bothered to dive into older papers, so recent NVIDIA stuff will do.

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So basically works the same way as Folding@Home?
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Embedding@Work
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HotBackpack@Commute
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DeadBattery@Work
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Only on the same local network I guess.
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or distributed.net
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