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Ben Dickson 8:30 AM CST • December 27, 2016 Comment
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Ben Dickson
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Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks.

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• Monetizing computing resources on the blockchain

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• Unlocking the potential of eye tracking technology
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As our desktop computers, laptops, mobile devices, etc. stand idly by Security
for a huge portion of the day, the need for computing resources is AI
growing at a fast pace. Large IoT ecosystems, machine learning and Crypto
deep learning algorithms and other sophisticated solutions being Apps
deployed in every domain and industry are raising the demand for
Events
stronger cloud servers and more bandwidth to address the minute
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needs of enterprises and businesses.
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So how can we make a more economic and efficient use of all the
computing power that’s going to waste? Blockchain, the distributed
ledger that’s gaining traction across various domains, might have the
answer to the dilemma by providing a platform that enables participants
to lend and borrow computing resources — and make money in the
process.

The rising challenges of computing

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“There is a growing demand for computing power from industries and

scientific communities to run large applications and process huge
volumes of data,” says Gilles Fedak, co-founder of iEx.ec, a distributed Login
cloud computing platform.

Fedak names several domains, such as product simulation, deep Search

learning and 3D rendering, where demand for expensive computing
resources and High-Performance Computing (HPC) is rising. Startups
Venture
“The biggest challenge for supercomputing is the demand to
Security
compress time,” says Jerry Cuomo, vice president of Blockchain for
Business at IBM. “Business processes must now be completed at a AI
significantly faster pace than before. The result is that the demand for Crypto
computing power is increasing exponentially.” Apps
Events
David Sønstebø, founder of IOTA, a distributed ledger for IoT, also
underlines the need to achieve real-time computation and overcome Startup Battlefield
the lag caused by current cloud-based models. “The biggest problem More
for computation overall is that the devices generating data are not
located close-by to the data centers that perform the analytics,” he
says.

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Courtesy of Getty Images. AI

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How distributed computing solves the Apps
problem Events

Compute resource sharing platforms such as SETI@home have Startup Battlefield

existed for years. But they still depend on central brokers to distribute More
and manage tasks, which can make things complicated.

One of the fields where centralized and cloud-based computing falls

short is the Internet of Things, Sønstebø says. “As IoT grows, the need
for distributed computing becomes an absolute necessity,” he says.
Latency in round-trips, network congestion, signal collisions and
geographical distances are some of the challenges faced when
processing data produced at edge devices in the cloud. “Devices
need to be able to trade computational resources with each other in
real time so that the computational load can be distributed,” he says.

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Some of the emerging lines of software will not be supported by

centralized architectures at all, iEx.ec’s Fedak says, such as
decentralized applications (DApps), which, among others, will power Login
fog computing, distributed AI and parallel stream processing. “This
class of application is extremely challenging because they’re both data
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and compute-intensive, and they don’t cope well with centralized
infrastructure,” Fedak says.
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Incentivizing resource sharing is also a problem with centralized Venture
models. Security

“If you look at the last 10-20 years’ of progress in virtualization, it’s AI
obvious that setting up any kind of environment in a data center or on Crypto
an individual computer has become much easier,” says Julian Apps
Zawistowski , co-founder and CEO of distributed computing platform Events
Golem. “But when it comes to actually renting the hardware, it still
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tends to be painful: comparing the offerings of different providers is
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complicated, and it takes quite a bit of time and expertise to figure out
the best solution for a given task.”

“The issue with getting payment involved is that you need to check
whether the participants are actually performing the work and also
integrate payment so that the provider of the compute capacity knows
that running the computations is going to be worth its time,” says
Preston Byrne, COO at Monax. This is easy when you’re dealing with
trusted entities such as the Amazon Web Services HPC platform, but
not so when you’re dealing with nodes that vary in hardware and
power.
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How distributed ledgers fill the gap Crypto

A distributed network of computers managed by blockchain and smart Apps

contracts can create a shared economy where anyone with a computer Events
can borrow idle computing power and make a side income. Startup Battlefield

The peer-to-peer nature of the blockchain and distributed ledgers will

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also help move computation closer to where the data is being

generated, and avoid bottleneck round-trips to cloud servers.

Byrne suggests that while not being a computation platform itself, the
blockchain can potentially create “a marketplace application that
attacks the specific problem of linking buyers and sellers of compute
time and allowing them to pay themselves in cryptocurrency without
needing an intermediary like AWS.”

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IOTA’s Sønstebø further elaborates on Byrne’s point and says that

distributed ledgers “shine in renting out computation in the fog, i.e. at
the edge of the network.” IOTA has developed a distributed ledger Login
based on Tangle, a scalable design that gets rid of the blocks and
introduces a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that reduces transaction
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times and removes fees, which according to Sønstebø creates the
backbone for an outsourced distributed on-demand computational
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trade model for M2M environments.
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Golem, which recently raised $8.6 million in Initial Coin Offering (ICO), Security
has created a peer-to-peer computation sharing platform on the
AI
Ethereum blockchain, which it dubs ‘Airbnb for computers.’ Golem
Crypto
enables application owners and individual users to rent the computing
Apps
resources of other users and pay for it directly in cryptocurrency.
Events
According to Eddy Azar, Growth Hacker at Golem, the platform has the
Startup Battlefield
potential to “reduce costs and increase speed in domains such as
More
scientific research, machine learning and graphics rendering, while
making it possible for anyone with an average or better computer to
share resources and make a side income.”

After submitting tasks to the Golem network, requestors are matched

with providers based on prices, reputations and machine performance
registered on the ledger. Resources are then sent to the provider for
processing and are sent back after the task is completed. The provider
is paid if the results pass verification tests. A user’s reputation is built-
up based on their success in completing tasks and making payments.

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Developers can use Golem’s open-source code and task API to create
program that uses the network and put it on Golem’s application
registry, which Azar likens to an app store, and make it available for Login
others to use and, if the developer so chooses, pay for.

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AI
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Startup Battlefield
iEx.ec is another distributed computing platform, which uses the
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Ethereum blockchain to create “a market network for applications,
data, and computing resources, including HPC ones,” says Julien
Béranger, the company’s Community Outreach Officer. “It means that
everyone will be able to offer their computing resources through smart
contract deployed on the blockchain.”

The platform uses Desktop Grid or Volunteer Computing to collect

underutilized computing resources to execute very large parallel
applications at a fraction of the cost of a traditional supercomputer.
This is the model used in distributed computing platforms like
SETI@Home, Folding@home and disributed.net.
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The iEx.ec team hopes the combination will provide inexpensive,

scalable and on-demand access CPU, GPU, data sets, storage and
other resources. Login

Blockchain makes a big difference, iEx.ec’s Fedak believes. “Because

the blockchain allows for a decentralized infrastructure, it can bring the Search
data closer to their producers and consumers,” he says, “whereas with
centralized cloud computing, data-centers tend to be located in Startups
remote areas.” Venture
The demand for computation will continue to grow as we move Security
forward. Whether cloud servers will scale up to meet the requirements
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in resources, costs and speed is yet to be seen. In the meantime, the
Crypto
blockchain proposes an alternative that can open up new possibilities
Apps
and succeed where previous technologies have failed.
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