What is Salad?

[AusWolf]

I've just seen an advert for something called "Salad" here on the TPU front page.

The questions are simple:

1. What is it? I see it's got crypto mining, AI and other shared work for your CPU and GPU that I don't fully understand.
2. Is it any good? I mean, being advertised on TPU is a plus, but still not a guarantee for anything.
3. Does it earn you any good money with the ridiculously high EU/UK energy prices?
4. I see it advertises with high-end Nvidia hardware (3080 minimum), but what about AMD? How about mid-range hardware, such as a 4060, for example?

 

[Deleted member 223428]

The short version is that Salad is a service that sells your GPU compute power to companies that need 'cloud compute' for their business purpose.

You could be processing just about anything on your GPU, including digital b00bies.

Workload Preferences - Salad Support

As chefs, you entrust Salad with your compute power and machine. We want to make sure we honor that trust by giving you as much clarity and control over what ki

support.salad.com

 

[JWNoctis]

This one at first glance seemed to stand out among others as a particularly bad idea, and not much of a step up from "browse the net and earn $$$" schemes.

That being said, it sounds just like what you said, unless it's something more nefarious. I'd rather volunteer the free computer time on mine to some worthier cause (and eat the electricity bill, which is thankfully not that much with the system de-tuned).

Actually, I wonder how much say TPU really has on what advertisement shows up on the site.

 

[64K]

"That is why we give you control of which workloads you want to run on your computer. Some of our SaladCloud clients run jobs that produce images and data of an adult nature."

My AvoidThisShitMeter is pinging loudly at this service.

Anyway, I already have control over my computer by not letting them on it to do who knows what.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I don't get ads here thankfully...

 

[Deleted member 223428]

I don't get ads here thankfully...

Yeah, this topic came up a while ago so I researched what Salad was. Pretty sure the only party winning here is Salad.

 

[64K]

I don't get ads here thankfully...

I do and I leave Adblocker off here to help out some but the ads aren't intrusive at all and never have been. W1zzard has said several times that he is careful with what ads he allows on this site and it's true. Some sites are just a damn mess with the ads though.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I do and I leave Adblocker off here to help out some but the ads aren't intrusive at all and never have been. W1zzard has said several times that he is careful with what ads he allows on this site and it's true. Some sites are just a damn mess with the ads though.

I just support TPU so I don't get the ads lol

1 buck a week seems pretty reasonable....

 

[AusWolf]

You could be processing just about anything on your GPU, including digital b00bies.

"That is why we give you control of which workloads you want to run on your computer. Some of our SaladCloud clients run jobs that produce images and data of an adult nature."

My AvoidThisShitMeter is pinging loudly at this service.

In all fairness, I don't have a problem with that as long as it's profitable. I've read a few Reddit posts that say that you can earn around $3-5 per day with a GPU between the 4060 Ti and the 4080 Super. If that's true, then it isn't much more than the cost of electricity to run that GPU here in the UK (a 320-Watt 4080 Super running 24/7 would eat about £2.5 per day), in which case, I'd rather just continue supporting science with BOINC myself.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

I love the name of this thread without context.

FWIW, this was inevitable to happen at some point. They are just a middleman for small companies and such to find some distributed computing, rather than paying a big player much money to run their workloads.

Similar to buying on Ebay rather than Amazon or at a physical location.

 

[DaemonForce]

Someone mention lunch? (;・∀・)

Oh.

Yeah no Imma set this one out. I have GPU cycles to spare in Rack 1 but this appears to be another sort of hive resource management type of system and I'm just not the target audience for this sort of stuff. Maybe when making content becomes some kind of precious resource that has me short of $$ every new game release or something. The bandwidth costs alone probably aren't worth it right now.

 

[freeagent]

Better lunch than jail haha

 

[AusWolf]

I love the name of this thread without context.

Sorry about that.

The advert, or even the website itself doesn't provide much context, either. It's worded in such a mysterious way that for a while, I thought it was some actual cooking program.

 

[W1zzard]

Actually, I wonder how much say TPU really has on what advertisement shows up on the site.

All our ads are in-house, we deal with the company directly, we serve the ads from our servers, we don't use any ad networks. Also for privacy. Only we see your data, nobody else, not the advertisers (who get high-level summaries only)

The actual workloads vary, they run a lot of Stable Diffusion on higher end cards, but you can also get some crypto related workloads or even just a test workload to test if your GPU is stable.

You can easily opt out of all slightly questionable things (sharing your connection/IP, adult). I can't imagine they are running illegal workloads on your system, these are good people.