I built a distributed compute grid where your idle laptop runs ML jobs — the orchestrator behind it

I built a distributed compute grid where your idle laptop runs ML jobs — the orchestrator behind it The pitch: a single FastAPI hub takes compute jobs from ML researchers, and a fleet of home PCs and gaming rigs (RTX 4090s, M2 MacBooks, anything with a GPU and a Python interpreter) polls in, picks up work, and ships results back. A 20% platform fee funds the hub. An interactive dashboard shows the mesh in real time. I have been living inside this codebase for a few weeks. This post is about the part that actually determines whether the thing works or does not — the orchestrator . No frontend, no marketing — just the brain. Live dashboard: man44.zo.space/compute-pool Repo: github.com/AmSach/ComputePool-Grid The problem with "dumb" schedulers The first version of ComputeOrchestrator had a one-line bug that took down a 12-node stress test. Two jobs hit the hub at the same millisecond. Both saw the same node as idle . Both wrote busy to the same row. One node ended up double-allocated, the other starved, and the test logs looked like a hostage negotiation. The fix had to be three things at once: A scoring function that picks the right node, not just the first idle one. An async lock so concurrent submissions cannot race on a single node. A heartbeat monitor that reclaims nodes that ghosted. Here is what it looks like now. The scoring algorithm def _calculate_score ( self , capacity : Dict [ str , Any ], requirements : Dict [ str , Any ]) -> float : """ Heuristic for node-task matching. """ score = 0.0 if capacity . get ( " gpu_vram " , 0 ) >= requirements . get ( " min_vram " , 0 ): score += 10.0 if capacity . get ( " cpu_cores " , 0 ) >= requirements . get ( " min_cores " , 0 ): score += 5.0 return score The weights are deliberately lopsided. A node that satisfies a job's VRAM requirement gets a 2x bonus over a node that just barely has enough cores. The intuition: GPU work is the long pole. If you cannot fit the model in VRAM, nothing else matters, no matter how many