Community Cloud: Bob Miles is the Australian founder and CEO of Salad Technologies. He envisions a world where we can all share devices and create a ‘global net’ to solve the world’s big problems.
With all the recent metaverse hype, you may have missed another notion that has become even more popular among industry leaders: ubiquitous computing. It’s not a new idea, but getting it will be a prerequisite for what could be the metaverse.
The concept should not be confused with edge computing, where the commonly cited goal is to reduce latency by servers located geographically close to the data source. Ubiquitous computing envisions a world where billions of Internet-connected devices can collaborate like a global mesh network. If it sounds like the Internet of Things in fancier packaging, you’re not exactly wrong, but you’re missing out on potential. We are talking about a total paradigm shift.
As the performance and technology stack of consumer-grade computing hardware nears parity with that of commercially available cloud servers, the average home computer will inevitably help power the Internet, fuel technological innovation, and more. Will even offer its owner the chance to support favorite causes and communities – all from the comfort of a keyboard.
Concurrent advances in consumer hardware and encryption have made this possible. Biggest obstacle? You have to persuade people on both sides to trust each other. Crypto may provide the answer. One day soon, sharing your computer will be as common as riding an Uber, or inviting strangers to your flat on Airbnb.
When most people think of cloud computing—and it’s admittedly not often—they usually envision a multimillion-dollar facility run by the likes of Google or Microsoft. But before you know it, ubiquitous computing may be bringing the cloud straight to your home.
High-end consumer GPUs and CPUs have achieved a level of performance that rivals the expensive hardware housed in the world’s fastest data centers. A powerful gaming PC is already equipped with enough under-the-hood optimization to tackle high-performance computation tasks such as crypto validation, 3D rendering, engineering simulation, or even progressive climate modeling.
Consumer computing capacity is the theoretical processing power of the world’s home computers and devices. By some estimates, it has outperformed corporate-owned data centers tenfold in the past decade! And most of our personal devices (besides the phones we use to run Wordle) lie idle all day long, just waiting to do some calculations.
Even in 2022, only half of the world has internet access. As more people come online, and new interoperable devices complicate our relationship with the web, today’s exponential data demand will increase at an unprecedented rate. There’s going to be a real market for elastic and available processing power, bandwidth, and storage.
With Home Hardware Pro, there is no doubt that we will try to make more network applications use idle compute resources for third party use. The only question is how to capitalize on this moment in a way that doesn’t violate the end-user’s trust. I like to call it “computesharing”.
Computersharing is new again
We have already seen what is possible when people voluntarily share the power of their devices. For twenty years, researchers at UC Berkeley invited private individuals to assist in the search for extraterrestrial life using their freebies. [email protected] Software. By the time the project ended in 2020, more than 1.8M unique users had contributed to the hunt on a distributed compute network.
In the early 2000s, [email protected] Famously borrowed processing power from thousands of defunct PlayStation 3 consoles to conduct medical research. Over five years, those network tools performed more than 100 million hours of protein folding simulations to unravel the genetic structure of some of the world’s most virulent diseases. Recently, the volunteer community donated countless hours to understanding the structure of the COVID-19 virus.
These projects are perhaps the best-known examples of distributed computing at scale. To participate in one, users only need to download a software client to a personal device. Both applications made use of shared secret processing cycles from idle hardware. Yet despite their success, none have really solved the trust problems inherent in distributed settings. He just kept avoiding them.
Because the engineers designed their software to manage unique workloads, the researchers could confidently distribute compute tasks to anonymous users with only minimal security measures. And since the end-user knew the software originated with trusted academic vendors, they could lend their equipment’s computing power without fear of abuse (even if their antivirus software threw up a red flag).
Community Cloud: How Cryptography Opens The Doors
Few people are willing to lend their personal equipment to support the noble endeavour. But for most people, a worthy cause isn’t motivating enough to allay their natural doubts about unknown actors accessing their wealth. Nor is it practical for end-users to download an app to run each compute job.
Thankfully, recent developments in cryptography have made it possible to securely deliver intensive computation tasks on a ubiquitous scale.
In 2020, IBM engineers published promising research on using a little-known encryption technique to process highly sensitive data (such as medical history), making malicious intrusions impossible even with physical access to host hardware. The process is known as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). It effectively obscures a piece of code during processing so that no one can understand its meaning until the job is done. The encrypted results are returned to the person who created the software to unpack.
Although it has seen little practical use since its invention in the 1970s, FHE is one of a number of cryptographic protections that allow researchers and technical innovators to work on a wide network of anonymous devices, without exposing user data or proprietary algorithms. allow your software to run.
When you consider that consumer operating systems like Windows 11 allow access to certain local machine resources – bobs, bits and cycles per second – in a secure service layer, it’s easy to predict a future where the world’s idle computer forces in. Involved can do practically anything.
Community Cloud: Crypto Breakthrough
We can build a sharing economy on this new digital frontier. But it is important to acknowledge that so-called “zero confidence” computing applications actually require highly reliable systems that clearly minimize losses. I believe it is equally imperative that participation is consensual, transparent and valuable as a real commodity.
To achieve truly ubiquitous computing, we need to codify the relationship between end-users and compute-job creators as mutually beneficial. If we can build trustworthy systems that appropriately reward user participation, there is no limit to the ways we can leverage our common computing power. And, we can build a more equitable Internet in the process.
The increasing adoption of cryptocurrency is actually a good predictor that this will all come to pass. Retail crypto exchanges are headlining the Super Bowl. This is despite the fact that most people have never read the white paper. Low may still exclude Satoshi from the lineup! (This is a joke.)
Through proof-of-work verification, blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum effectively demonstrate how built-in monetization models can encourage supply-side network participation. The prospect of a block reward can generally entice enough anonymous contributors to keep the network afloat.
It’s this tempting incentive that gets people interested enough to learn about safe, yet “trusted” systems. Give someone a basic understanding of blockchain fundamentals and the right hardware, and you’ve given them all they need to cryptomine.
If you can reliably and securely deliver any kind of job over a network made up of any kind of hardware, all that’s missing is a powerful incentive for folks at keyboards. Sharing economies based on interoperable cryptocurrencies may provide that missing piece.
Community Cloud: Looking Towards Ubiquity
Securely leverage consumer-owned computing resources, reward private individuals for their contributions to third-party workloads, and access the unique capabilities of any number of interconnected devices to accomplish large-scale computation tasks Access is possible.
Anyone who has ever contributed resource resources to a mining pool can understand how to collaborate with unknown actors for a common goal. Within a few years, I think we’ll see computesharing become as common as ridesharing, flatsharing, or any number of other radical notions that now come pre-installed on your mobile phone.
About the Author:
Bob is the founder and CEO of Salad Technologies. After starting his career as a pilot and aeronautical performance engineer at Qantas Airways, Bob co-founded the digital production company responsible for The Green Way Up, a twelve-part television series commissioned by National Geographic. and is distributed through Netflix. The program followed Bob and his fellow engineers as they traveled across the Australian continent in a vehicle powered by a waste-to-fuel system of their own design. Bob leveraged many years of experience in product-management mobile applications as co-founder of the connected car startup, which developed network software for consumer automobiles. He later relocated to the United States to take a position as Head of Product at a consumer drone manufacturer, where his passion for aviation was combined with his expertise in building network applications.
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