It sounds like iroh enables distributed compute without having to finangle custom hardware.

I thought about this too, but the throughput over a network is incredibly slow. It’s not usable for interactive use.

cocompute.ai is already doing this really well.

I note the lack of performance information. I can only imagine it's much, much, slower than any other way to run a larger model (including, e.g. using system RAM and streaming some stuff from disk). Consumer networks, even 10gbit ethernet, are slow as hell compared to local RAM and even disks.

Are we talking 1 token per second for a split model? Less?

Edit: Found a number. On the models list, Qwen 235B A22B says "MoE 235B/22B, proven at 16 tok/s across 2 nodes". They don't say what the nodes are and what network connection they have, but that's a respectable speed. Not quite comfortable for interactive use, but pretty close.

Does Mesh LLM encrypt the payload between nodes? Is it possible to read requests from other users?