0.0000005 Seconds of Computation for You

The “0.0000005 Seconds of Computation for You” project allows you to receive a page with a unique set of assembly instructions, roughly corresponding to 0.0000005 seconds of computation. These instructions (part of a 433 million large set) were recorded while running a 1-second-long program on my machine. The aim of this project is to stretch indefinitely, both in time and in space, this daily occurring but easily overlooked act of running some software: if ran to completion, approximately 2 million people anywhere in the world can receive a page with an unique set of instructions.

If you wish to receive in the (snail) mail the page displayed below, press “Request Page” and leave your name and address. Your address will be used solely to mail you the page and discarded afterwards. Your email will be only to contact you in case there are problems with mailing the page.

Technical Details

Approximately 466 million assembly instructions were collected while running ‘ffmpeg‘ to extract the video frames used in the Origins project. It just happened that the total running time for the application was one second on a Windows 8.1 machine, running on an Intel Core i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz, with 16GB of RAM. The instructions were extracted using IntelĀ® Software Development Emulator. The raw output from the emulator was cleaned up using my own custom C# software to extract only the assembly instructions. Each page is created using a custom PHP script running on this server; jQuery was used on the client side. No two requests will receive the same set of instructions (i.e. each page is unique).

Acknowledgement

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