CycleCash

How often is your computer sitting there doing nothing and wasting cycles while still turned on? Oftentimes, if you're anything like me. And once those cycles have been wasted, they're wasted. But it doesn't have to be this way....

Projects like Seti have found certain uses for wasted cycles in a distributed system. However, there isn't a general model for distributed public computation currently.

I propose 'CycleCash', whereby you let your computer run other people code. The code would run in a hermetically sealed sandbox, so it couldn't do anything even vaguely annoyingly to your machine - e.g. just allow numerical computation. The sandbox would also let you set a thread priority for the computation, so you could still use your machine for other things. You gain cycle cash credits for the amount of computation you allow. If you want to run a computation later on, you can 'spend' your credits by getting other computers out there run your code - many computers may be involved so you could get a result quite quickly.

The disadvantage of this system is that it is more suited to numerical computations (that have compact result data) than anything else, since you need to get the result of the computation back to the originator over the network (and large files, e.g. generated images, would be annoyingly slow to send).

Can't see it happening, but the idea I like.