Fancy being paid to help power a distributed supercomputer with your laptop or PC when you aren’t using it? Bristol startup YellowDog is creating an application that uses people’s spare computing processing power to help animation companies render computer graphics – a process that requires a lot of computer grunt.
YellowDog was founded earlier this year by Gareth Williams and Simon Ponsford and is currently running a crowd-funding campaign on Seedrs in an effort to raise £150,000. Impressively, it netted 91% of its target in just one week.
“A computer that is less than two years old and is used eight hours a day would earn £5 a week”
As Gareth (pictured left) explains “We believe this has the potential to create the world’s fastest super-computer. There are 8.8 million people in the UK between the ages 24 and 35; there are 2.3 million students in higher education, 89% have laptops. If we joined together all these laptops we would create the fastest supercomputer the world has ever seen, over 4x the current fastest. That’s enough processing power to render a film like Toy Story in 1 minute 12 seconds.
“A computer that is less than two years old and is used eight hours a day would earn £5 a week,” he adds.
The campaign will raise money to allow YellowDog to accelerate the commercialisation of the product, letting them launch in October rather than next February.
YellowDog, which was accepted into Bristol business incubator SETsquared in January, makes its money by charging animation studios for the amount of computer power used to complete their render:
Rendering money: How people will know how much they
have earned for their spare compute power
The price is set per hour and is charged by the second. The more computing power the studio requests, the higher the price and the quicker the render completes.
With over 50 days left until the campaign closes it’s looking good for them reaching their target. Good luck from TechSPARK, guys!
You can see more about how the app works at the YellowDog website. Interested in investing? Check out the YellowDog Seedrs campaign.
- You may like: Business idea platform IdeaSquares already 50% funded on its third crowd-funding round
To see more impressive tech projects which originate in the West of England, why not check out Venturefest Bristol & Bath on 9 June.
