How do you do something fun with your computer s idle computing power?

Use the computer to learn a drawing software, such as ps, and you will find that it can draw a lot of interesting **; Use the computer to build a **, write some of your own things and share them with everyone, after a long time, you will get not only fun but also wealth; Use the computer to save some**, and you will have another surprise if you inadvertently turn it out in the future.

If your program doesn't have the nature of data parallelism, such as iterating on an overall data set, then using idle computing power is not something you can do in a few tens of minutes or hours. First you need to physically connect these computers to form a network. Then you need an abstraction layer to provide a unified computing interface for the computers on this network.

This can be an operating system, it can be a virtual machine, it can be a specialized computing platform at the application layer. Eventually, you'll need to rewrite your program using the programming model that goes with this computing interface.

Users can directly access applications on the cloud through the web, and do not need to install clients locally, such as some web conferencing systems. The virtual desktop rarely interacts with the user's terminal, and it is an independent system interface after login, which is equivalent to a notebook becoming an input and output device, which feels more like a replacement.

This platform software is easy to install and easy to configure, and can only support specific calculations. Platforms that can support general-purpose computing are generally complex to install and configure without guaranteeing performance.

Depending on the level of abstraction of this computing interface, the amount of work you need to modify the program will vary. Let's say you install Linux on every computer, and then parallel your programs with MPI. Because MPI is less abstract, you need to explicitly specify the Send Recv, or Broadcast, of each communication in your program, and arrange the pairing and order of the sender and receiver of these communications.

But if you decide that your program is suitable for the map-reduce model, you can configure Hadoop on each machine and then rewrite your program with the map-reduce model so that you don't have to worry about communication and task scheduling.

Mini box + server combination,In fact, there are dozens of virtual machines in the server,And then the bottom layer of the box is a linux or Android remote to the server of a certain virtual machine,The customer just sees the upper layer,That is, the virtual machine (of course, the above principles are all guesses,Just used the desktop cloud). Today, with better and better network speeds, it is also possible for servers to be placed on the desktop cloud.

Nowadays, cloud hosting service providers are developing rapidly, and the elastic scaling feature allows us to quickly configure a high-performance server, coupled with the rise of GPU servers. Can we use a cloud server to connect with a local computer, send a part of the processing task to the server, and then return the processing results of the server, and use the server to improve the local computing power?

Companies that do movies and animations rent high-performance servers to submit new content at any time, and render it at any time. The main bottleneck that limits this service is easy to understand, and that is the real-time requirement. For example, when playing a game, 60 frames of data per second that vary with input are processed, and it is impossible to package and calculate the result every frame and send it back.