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Contents
Members
Payment/Referrals
Q: How do I earn money? How much do you pay?
A: You will be paid a fixed amount of money for each unit of work your computer completes and sends back to Gridfinity. The rate will vary depending on the type of job completed, and the rate you earn per CPU hour will consequently depend on the speed of your computer. The standard with which we charge buyers is $0.30 per hour their computation would have taken on our own machines.
Q: How can I withdraw my money?
A: You can transfer your balance to the Paypal account you have on file with us.
Q: What do you mean by "90% payout for life"?
A: For a limited time, users who sign up to be grid participants will lock in a 90% payout for life. After taking into account overhead costs for maintaining the system and extra workunits in order to check for fraudulent results, 90% of our income will be paid straight back to you. More information on how much you can earn is on our Information for Members page.
Q: Is there any bonus for referring my friends?
A: Yes, for each friend you refer you will receive an additional 1% of what is paid out to them. Also, your friends are not penalized in any way for signing up as a referred user and still will receive the full payout they would have otherwise received. In turn, they can also refer people and receive bonuses.
Computing
Q: What is QEMU and why does Gridfinity use it?
A: This is answered below in the question "How do I know that Gridfinity is safe and won't harm my computer?".
Q: When does Gridfinity use my computer?
A: By default, your computer is used when it is idle, has enough disk space and memory available, and is plugged in (in the case of laptops). However, you may change your preferences whenever you wish to make it more or less available to the grid.
Q: Will my software firewall block your software?
A: Not usually. In our own tests we experienced no problems with firewalls or NAT routers. If you are unsure if your computer is able to communicate with our servers, check your account status page to see when we last heard from your computer. If you think you are having problems, check out the firewall section of our documentation for more information.
Q: Does my computer always have to be connected to the Internet?
A: No, but your computer must be connected regularly to check in, receive work, and submit completed results. Also, the more often your computer checks in for work, the more likely you will be to earn money.
Q: I already use my computer for a BOINC project. Can I use Gridfinity as well?
A: Yes! As a matter of fact, Gridfinity's backend uses an unmodified BOINC client for communication with our server, so you may just add our project to your existing BOINC manager. However, you must be aware that certain features of your BOINC manager may not act properly with our project (pause/resume, etc.). This behavior is due to technicalities of how the BOINC manager interoperates with our virtualization layer. Also, you still need to register a user account through our website. Once doing so, you may connect to Gridfinity's BOINC server at http://www.gridfinity.com/ -- just as you do with any other BOINC project.
If you wish to use the Gridfinity client instead of your existing BOINC manager, you need to copy the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file to the Gridfinity directory so that our GUI can communicate with your existing BOINC client.
Q: I run Linux, can I use Gridfinity as well?
A: We fully support Linux systems. Please read our Linux Documentation for instructions on how to get started.
Q: Does Gridfinity support 64-bit operating systems?
A: Yes. For Linux, instructions are identical whether you are running 32-bit or 64-bit, though you should be aware that Gridfinity still distributes statically compiled 32-bit binaries, so you should have the basic 32-bit libraries. You can use the Linux prerequisite test for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. On 64-bit Windows operating systems, you must first install VMware Player because QEMU currently does not have an accelerator module for 64-bit Windows.
Security
Q: Does your software contain any spyware or adware?
A: Absolutely not. There is no spyware or adware in our software. You will not see any advertisements nor will our software collect any identifying information about you. See our privacy policy for more information. Additionally, here is a list of anti-spyware/anti-adware software that we suggest.
Q: How do I know that Gridfinity is safe and won't harm my computer?
A: Gridfinity utilizes state of the art virtualization technology to encapsulate each computation in a secure and abstract layer that runs on your machine. To do this, the Gridfinity client uses QEMU, an advanced, free virtualization solution. This "virtual machine" has no access to your computer, files, or local network; it may only see and modify files within this encapsulated environment and any changes made will be lost as soon as the computation has finished. Due to this virtualization layer, our software is actually much safer than just about any other software you can find on the Internet because the latter runs directly on your computer without any buffer. We require this layer of protection in order to ensure to our members a maximum level of safety.
Buyers
Business
Q: Is Gridfinity cheaper than building my own grid or supercomputer?
A: Almost always--to find out for your specific situation, please use our completely customizable build vs. buy calculator. When calculating the costs of rolling their own computing infrastructure, IT staff (and often CIOs) have a tendency to gloss over the costs of other critical components besides the necessary computers, processors, and memory. Other outlays such as data center space, electricity, HVAC systems, networking equipment, maintenance and upgrades, and the skilled personnel required to run such a setup can account for as much as 75% percentage of total costs. In fact, certain risk avoidance expenditures such as fire suppression and backup generator systems can be avoided completely when using a distributed and resilient grid.
Q: Is Gridfinity cheaper than the other players (e.g. Sun and IBM) who let you rent space on their own computing infrastructure?
A: Yes, and the reasons why follow closely with rolling your own infrastructure. The incumbents have to do with everything mentioned above and usually with higher labor costs. Most importantly, these companies try to charge a name-brand premium for you to use their systems just because of their history. Consumers may have bought into this in the past, but IT departments across the world have embraced the concept of using inexpensive, commodity hardware to accomplish the same results for less. Why pay up to $1.00/hr, when you can run your demanding jobs on the same AMD and Intel processors for fractions of that?
Q: What about my own resources? Can I resell those to you when they are temporarily unused?
A: Of course. Grid users may sign up not only to use time on the grid, but also to put time on the grid. Think of this setup as analogous to a business or home that consumes power from the electric company, but has a solar panel to collect and send power back any time they have a surplus. The credit you accumulate by computing work units for others can be banked and used when you need it most.
Technical
Q: How easy is it to get up and running?
A: Very. All you need to do is submit your compiled application and a short script to execute it. Gridfinity will encapsulate your application in a virtualization layer and package it along with your work units for computation. Once the results are done, you will be able to download and analyze them.
Q: What sort of integration can you provide with my systems?
A: Gridfinity is committed to working with our clients to make using our powerful grid as seamless as possible. We offer many ways to submit/retrieve jobs including web (https), ssh, and e-mail. Further improvements are coming and if you have a custom requirement, we will do our best to accommodate your needs.
Q: Won't virtualization slow my application down?
A: Barely. With today's technology, lightweight virtual machines efficiently utilize the processor and computationally intensive applications see only 3-5% slowdown. Our financial services sponsor has run extensive tests with their applications and found no significant increase in run time when running within a virtualization layer on the same hardware. They have even seen marginal speed improvements when running on a stripped virtualized Linux system as opposed to the host Windows environemnt.
Billing/Payment
Q: How am I billed?
A: You are billed based on your direct usage of the grid. The total number of "weighted cpu hours" that your jobs use will be multiplied by our low hourly rate. For example, if your job took 1 hour on 100 computers or 100 hours on 1 computer, your bill for either situation would be: (100x1 or 1x100)=100 cpu hours x $0.30 dollars/cpu hour = $30 dollars.
Q: What payment methods do you accept?
A: We accept all major credit cards as well as Paypal.
Q: How do I know that your billing methods are accurate? Can't grid participants modify their software to report that jobs took longer to complete than they actually did?
A: Our billing methods are transparent and are verified and audited by an outside party. We randomly sample work units that are sent to grid participants and compute them ourselves to check both the integrity of the computation as well as to benchmark the length of time the jobs take.
There is no incentive for participants to try to report that jobs took longer than they actually did because they are paid on a per-work unit basis and not on an hourly rate; we do not use the time that users' software reports it spent on computations for any billing purposes whatsoever. This method also ensures that work units run on slower hardware will not cost any more than work units run on faster hardware.
Q: What about sending incomplete work units back early?
A: In addition to the layer of encapsulation and lack of visibility to the participant, Gridfinity has developed proprietary algorithms for auditing the integrity of our grid participants. We randomly sample identical work units, compute them ourselves, and check them against what participants are sending back. It is in their best economic interest not to cheat as anyone found cheating (or attempting to cheat) will have their balance cleaned out and be banned from our grid for life.
Q: I am concerned that some of the results I am getting back are fraudulent. What should I do?
A: We keep records in our database of which user returned each workunit, and so cheating is easily traceable. In the event that a user has tried to return fraudulent results, we take the matter very seriously and as such we will pay close attention to any claims of fraud. We encourage you to bring the matter to our attention by filing a support ticket with us. In addition to re-running the workunit ourselves, we will flag the specific user for future checks against cheating and review previously completed workunits by that user for evidence of cheating as well.
Security
Q: How do I know my applications and data are safe?
A: Since the premise of Gridfinity is public computing, it is inevitable that submitted applications and input data will be distributed to those computers on which they will be used. While virtual encapsulation makes getting at the data and applications non-trivial, it is nonetheless possible for home users to gain access to your compiled programs and input. However, we supply no data that can be used to determine from which Gridfinity buyer the software originated. If you are concerned about proprietary data or software being stolen, we suggest you obfuscate input/output as well as program names and parameters.
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