A for-dummies crew for trusted local (or remote) machines

[kendonB]

SearchGPT estimates that there are about 30x more CPUs in the USA sitting inside personal machines than in cloud or HPC compute systems. At any given time, a small fraction of those personal CPUs are in use.

Could there be a crew.local package (similar to crew.cluster) which makes it easy to spin up compute on other trusted machines? I think a lot of the infrastructure is already there (see https://wlandau.github.io/crew/articles/plugins.html).

[wlandau]

Do you mean if you want workers to be on a different personal computer than the one you are running? As long as the networking allows it, a plugin could be developed. There is of course an existing crew_controller_local(), but all the workers are on the same machine as the local process.

[kendonB]

That's right. It would be even better if it was workers on multiple different personal computers. I'm imagining use cases like an office network where the nerds run sims with a few cores from everyone else's machines.