VectorDash - Rent GPUs to AI researchers. $7.68 per 1080ti per day - page 3.

KaydenC

sr. member

Activity: 610

Merit: 265

Quote from: Bare on March 25, 2018, 07:35:29 AM

Rent gpu to AI researchers?

Sorry but I call this BS phishing attempt, mainly because why would any serious AI researchers first turn to a miner forum - regular people, instead of going to some high class universities/ some other institutes...etc. anywhere in the world and collaborate with their departments there?
I'm sure lots of universities/institutes would be open for these kinds of things and are well funded for these kind of projects if there's a good initiative...

If it's fishy, it's usually because it is...

just my 2 cents.

In the reddit post it says "I had a friend who was mining Ethereum on his Nvidia 1080 ti's. I would Venmo him double what he was making by mining Ethereum, and in return he would let me train my neural networks on his computer at significantly less than what I would have had to pay AWS."

And

"Compared to the GPU server I rented from AWS, my neural net (using TensorFlow) trained ~5x quicker on my friend's mining rig which had one 1080 ti."

Note the Nvidia K80 costs $20 usd a day and is 5x slower than a 1080ti.

To them it makes economic sense to find cheaper alternatives to AWS. BTW my university only has a handful of K20X Teslas (which has a tenth of a 1080ti Tflops) and we are considered very well off: http://www.its.hku.hk/services/research/hpc/hpc2015/configuration

Institutes resources pales in comparison to miner's hardware. Phishing is always possible, the brave ones will test first.

BitBustah

hero member

Activity: 1218

Merit: 534

I'm starting to believe that their "idea" might be legit.

Seems like the Sharif Shameem profile on twitter is pretty solid.
Also found his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharif-shameem/

One of his connections on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arbaz-khatib/

Looks like VectorDash is a project of a few college guys from Maryland College.

Even if it is legit (as in: you are really getting paid for offering your hashes to researchers), it's still good to know:
- Are they a real licensed/registered company?
- Where are they located?
- What about the money handling? Who do we contact in case of problems?

felixbrucker

hero member

Activity: 700

Merit: 500

Quote from: Bare on March 25, 2018, 07:35:29 AM

Rent gpu to AI researchers?

Sorry but I call this BS phishing attempt, mainly because why would any serious AI researchers first turn to a miner forum - regular people, instead of going to some high class universities/ some other institutes...etc. anywhere in the world and collaborate with their departments there?
I'm sure lots of universities/institutes would be open for these kinds of things and are well funded for these kind of projects if there's a good initiative...

If it's fishy, it's usually because it is...

just my 2 cents.

Probably because they do it as a hobby and nobody offers free access to resources without any personal gain (that includes universities). miners are a cheap alternative. That being said all the above applies as well.

Bare

member

Activity: 130

Merit: 11

Rent gpu to AI researchers?

Sorry but I call this BS phishing attempt, mainly because why would any serious AI researchers first turn to a miner forum - regular people, instead of going to some high class universities/ some other institutes...etc. anywhere in the world and collaborate with their departments there?
I'm sure lots of universities/institutes would be open for these kinds of things and are well funded for these kind of projects if there's a good initiative...

If it's fishy, it's usually because it is...

just my 2 cents.

icoreview_romania

newbie

Activity: 70

Merit: 0

Quote from: DevonMiner on March 25, 2018, 06:22:51 AM

I agree this sounds a little fishy, but an interesting idea, not a lot on Google.

Domain Name: Registered 3rd October 2017, so not brand new.

Reddit Page: https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/86ofw2/rent_out_your_gpu_compute_to_ai_researchers_and/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/vectordashGPU/

Will be interesting to hear from anyone who has had a positive experience with this system.

Yeah. Too fishy for me.

DevonMiner

sr. member

Activity: 471

Merit: 250

I agree this sounds a little fishy, but an interesting idea, not a lot on Google.

Domain Name: Registered 3rd October 2017, so not brand new.

Reddit Page: https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/86ofw2/rent_out_your_gpu_compute_to_ai_researchers_and/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/vectordashGPU/

Will be interesting to hear from anyone who has had a positive experience with this system.

crocozino

sr. member

Activity: 420

Merit: 250

sounds fishy a little, actually
I guess I'll pass this one. though the offer seem extremely profitable cause now gtx1080ti is barely making 1$ per day so 7$ is a way better, but I'd prefer it was some kind of a lab from some university, I guess
that would be more trustful for me and those AI things frights me. actually, i really think terminator stuff can happen and that is no fun at all

sigtmerchant

member

Activity: 182

Merit: 11

Quote from: BitBustah on March 25, 2018, 01:29:37 AM

Guys be careful... There's some info missing on that site. Company information, min payout etc etc.. Are you really giving some anonymous person access to your system?
They also wanna know how much disk space you got etc.

Just think of it. With access to your system, they could easily:

- host warez, illegal porn, illegal software, illegal services, ...
- install mallware
- use your server as a proxy
- use your server as part of a botnet
...

Be careful folks, that's all I'm saying.

Hosting anything on a tiny rig's SSD/HDD doesn't make sense. However, I agree with you on other potential risks like botnets etc.

Levsha110mb

newbie

Activity: 23

Merit: 0

I am looking forward to more information about this project/.

BitBustah

hero member

Activity: 1218

Merit: 534

Quote from: jmigdlc99 on March 25, 2018, 01:41:41 AM

Sounds promising if real, but i agree with the other posts, a little caution is best with new popup projects like this. I imagine they are funded by research grants and have the money to spend but until they provided more information on who they are and what they are doing, i could imagine a number of ways they could compromise your hardware and system.

I may try and install ubuntu on one of my rigs and update this post once i get more info.

Keep us up to date please. Thanks Wink

jmigdlc99

sr. member

Activity: 784

Merit: 282

Sounds promising if real, but i agree with the other posts, a little caution is best with new popup projects like this. I imagine they are funded by research grants and have the money to spend but until they provided more information on who they are and what they are doing, i could imagine a number of ways they could compromise your hardware and system.

I may try and install ubuntu on one of my rigs and update this post once i get more info.

BitBustah

hero member

Activity: 1218

Merit: 534

Guys be careful... There's some info missing on that site. Company information, min payout etc etc.. Are you really giving some anonymous person access to your system?
They also wanna know how much disk space you got etc.

Just think of it. With access to your system, they could easily:

- host warez, illegal porn, illegal software, illegal services, ...
- install mallware
- use your server as a proxy
- use your server as part of a botnet
...

Be careful folks, that's all I'm saying.

Agozyen

sr. member

Activity: 672

Merit: 252

Until the end

Max Likelihood

jr. member

Activity: 140

Merit: 2

This is really interesting. Regrettably I have G4400s and just 8gb ram in Onda B250s with single RAM slot and no SSD running SMOS on USB, though if this project has legs I'd consider upgrading.

I'm a quantitative researcher and use some ML, though locally on my own machine where CPU speed and core count are the rate limiting factors, and not with datasets in the terrabytes like these marketing projects. I would think for a cloud-based operation application run through people's GPUs they wouldn't need too much in the way of a user's CPU, though we'll see as I contacted them.

BitBustah

hero member

Activity: 1218

Merit: 534

And again all company info etc is missing.. Who rents out their rigs to companies -or better individuals- like this?

Jacknife

newbie

Activity: 64

Merit: 0

I think I will give it a try and upgrade my system memory.

KaydenC

sr. member

Activity: 610

Merit: 265

Vectordash: https://vectordash.com/hosting/
Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/86ofw2/rent_out_your_gpu_compute_to_ai_researchers_and/

Info I gathered so far:

How it works
- AI Researchers rent your GPUs on an hourly basis.
- The moment your rig is rented, all other GPU compute tasks (like mining) is paused till the rental period is over.
- Supported on Ubuntu. May work on other linux distros but no confirmation yet.
- No support on Windows 10 as GPU VM pass through isn't available on win 10.

Hardware requirements
- Nvidia Pascal GPU and Titans Maxwell, Pascal, Volta only. No AMD support.
- Minimum 2gb ram required per GPU.
- Slight reduction in performance using Pcie x1 lanes, but works.
- No concrete info on ssd space or CPU requirement.

Other info
- You can host as many AI researchers as you have GPUs. So if your rig has 8 gpus, it may be rented by 8 different researchers running their own AI training on a different GPU.
- If your rig went offline before the rental period is up, you aren't paid.
- There's a feedback system. If your system is super slow or unstable, bad feedback may be left on your rig.

Get started
- Upgrade to 16gb ram
- Install Ubuntu
- Fill up the form on the reddit thread and wait for a reply. Creator of this app said he'll reply tomorrow.

Thoughts? I'm switching one rig over to Ubuntu for now and will see how it progresses. I really like how our rigs will be doing useful work AND we will get paid 3x more too (if it's rented).

Topic: VectorDash - Rent GPUs to AI researchers. $7.68 per 1080ti per day - page 3. (Read 2962 times)