RE: Why Gridcoin Should Embrace SPARC "Competition"
I'm reluctant to even offer this up for fear of how it will be taken, but my biggest concern with Gridcoin is that I feel as though we operate based on the assumption that we are in competition with nobody.
Gridcoin vs. iEx/Golem/SONM/(now SPARC)
SPARC is identical to GOLEM, iEx, and SONM.
I don't think anyone I have spoken to dislikes competition.
So, why don't we engage iEx, Golem, SONM, or SPARC? There are no products. There is nothing to talk about. The only difference we know of is the structure by which we fund the computing, BOINC vs. PaytoPlay.
Present a product, a prototype, an actual plan, something to talk about. Until then, you are seeking to take advantage of our community.
EDIT ADD:
When someone says they "have access to some people".... anyone can say that at any time. They probably know the rosetta project leader or something.
The big difference is SPARC explicitly claims to be aiming to run MATLAB, Comsol and Blender. I do not know about Blender, but the first two pieces of software are incredibly expensive and require core-based licensing. This means if you want to spread your job to double the machines, you need double the licences. Further, any research done in this software needs a special research licence, which is even more expensive.
Unless they have 1000s of licences or an agreement with e.g. Mathworks who publishes MATLAB, this is 100% illegal.
Doesn't sound like they've researched it that thoroughly..
Exactly. It sounds like they picked an ongoing desire from the research community, then grabbed the closest thing that already exists, and promised to bridge the gap.
There is no evidence I can find of any progress towards that though... If they are really capable of doing it, they would only need to present a single working distributed CPU model for MATLAB and they would have money thrown at them. They could even sell such load leveling software to every university. I assume nothing has actually been done yet, mainly because it cannot be done without the blessing of Mathworks.