A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices

Bric3d

They'll throw this together but still not sell you something you can stick in a rack ?

simbas

That's why the button is on the underside.

sdoering

Pardon me not understanding what this is about? Basically SETI for AI workloads? At least, this is the impression the landingpage left me with. I am a bit lost, tbh.

veexx103

This project sounds good. What is it actually like?

tom1337

I guess for companies this can be nice? Run some inference in the off-hours on the machines that you already have. Could be useful for analytical tasks that don't require to be instant. On the technical side this doesn't seem that groundbreaking for me though.

pm90

My warm take is that Apple is leaving a lot of money on the table by not investing in creating an independent supply chain for their chips and building their own cloud. They arguably had the first mover advantage when it came to general purpose arm compute; all they had to do was flood the market and make it easy for anyone to rent it. Not only would they corner a part of the market but perhaps ease demand pressure on other chip manufacturers too.

gempir

Interesting, so this is basically Apple's version of exo ? https://github.com/exo-explore/exo

brandonpelfrey

I don't get it. In the paper it sounds like it's "just" a CRUD DB, then you have some fleet of Macs, and they store inputs and outputs in S3. What's the innovation here? Not trying to poo on this, but it looked like the most basic and obvious approach.

pjmlp

Apple rediscovering HPC clusters, but without OS X Server to serve alongside it.

skhameneh

I’m a bit disappointed in the lack of depth (and use of Ollama): https://arxiv.org/html/2610.12970v1 Apple has released some small models previously that seemed genuinely great, along with some quality research/efforts. I’m just not seeing the same level of depth here, am I missing something?

tw1984

internal system, so the IT/HR department is the solution to leechers. nothing new here.

djoldman

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.12970 Shortest promoted paper I've seen from a FAANG.

sehw

>Apple steals your electicity while you take a dump

lynndotpy

It would be so incredibly cool if we finally had an accessible consumer-accessible way to turn a network of computers on a network into a supercomputer. A household has a child who gets into 3D artwork and wants to render something? People can opt their tablets, phones, laptops, whatever to crunch out some frames overnight while not being used.

mindwork

Is this opt-in or opt-out?

eikenberry

Sounds similar to Salad (salad.com), except for the differing hardware.

magicmicah85

It's not a novel idea, but its provable that someone can take this same concept and do something truly groundbreaking. I wonder if there's value in the idea that you can join a supercomputer network of MAC/Nvidia GPUs as a way of getting off cloud and into "our cloud". As long as you offer compute, you have credit into the system to be able to support your own workloads that can't be done on just your hardware. Need to address concerns about privacy, abuse, etc, but Apple's idea here has some merit if applied right.

nico

Would love to build something like this but for classification models that run on CPU. Like a “Classify @ Home” p2p compute network, to which people could contribute their machines and see what work is being done Building the classification part now :) https://jeffyclassify.com/

bouk

Why is this a paper? Should've just been a blogpost. Maybe I don't understand academia

cmdrk

Apple has reinvented cycle scavenging about 40 years later.