Introducing OmnibusCloud: crowdfunding, but for computation

Welcome to OmnibusCloud!

If you’re new here, the idea is pretty simple:

Some jobs are just too big for one machine.

Rendering an animated film, running a heavy simulation, processing a huge dataset - on a single computer, that can take weeks or months. OmnibusCloud is an attempt to split that work across many idle computers owned by real people.

Think of it a bit like crowdfunding, but instead of contributing money, people contribute compute time. That’s the idea behind crowdcomputing.

The first type of project OmnibusCloud supports is 3D rendering. For example, an artist could upload a film project, and the crowd could help render it frame by frame.

But OmnibusCloud itself is not meant to be just a render farm. Rendering is only the first use case because it is easy to understand and easy to see. The platform is built around plugins, called controllers, so other types of work can be added later: simulations, data processing, research workloads, or things I haven’t even thought of yet.

There are two ways to use it:

• Contribute: run the OmnibusCloud client on machines you own. You decide which machines participate, when they are allowed to work, and you can pause them at any time. The client is meant to use idle time, not get in your way.
• Create: start a project, explain what you are trying to compute and why it matters, and let other people help run it.

Right now OmnibusCloud is in open beta. The goal is to see how the idea behaves on real machines, with real users, real failures, and real workloads.

There will definitely be rough edges at this stage. If something breaks, behaves strangely, or just feels confusing, please say so. That kind of feedback is exactly what this beta is for.

This subreddit is for:

• release notes
• questions
• bug reports and feedback
• showing things you rendered or helped render
• discussing new controller ideas
• talking about the general crowdcomputing concept

I’ll read everything posted here.

Project site: omnibuscloud.com
About, architecture, whitepaper: omnibuscloud.io
Open-source addon and controllers: GitHub/OmnibusCloud

If you found this from another post - welcome, and thanks for being early. If you try it and something breaks, that’s not a failure - that’s beta testing. Please tell me what happened.