I've been following the SPARC project for a while now but their team has been quiet for over a month now and that always gets a bit worrying. Even if a blockchain project has no live product yet we like to know if progress is being made.
For those that haven't heard of SPARC before here's a review I wrote before:
Of the distributed computation networks I really like how this team has chosen a way to distribute tasks that is simple and utilizes what should be almost zero install computation nodes - web browsers. Using web assembly and integrated access to graphics card based computation power they should allow almost anyone to contribute computing resources to the SPARC distributed supercomputer.
While the Queens University (Kingston, Ontario) based team is full of relative unknowns with no background in blockchain development I do think they have technical chops to design and build the computation part. I'm just unsure about the blockchain integration part. However since reward payments will be infrequent, not micropayments then they probably wont need anything too complex like payment channels at this point.
While roll out of the full platform is a way off they are already working with Boinc and rewarding BOINC collaborators with SPARC tokens.
I will admit to some bias here as I'm definitely a fan of using decentralized systems to do computations like this even if BOINC was doing it long before there was a simple way to reward people and encourage participation. A system designed by academics who are experts in number crunching seems to be the right way to do it instead of taking a business lead team. In addition, I think the lack of native dependencies by utilizing the standardized web platform for computations is pure genius.
I'm pleased to say that afer some back and forth communication with one of their executives I've established
a) they are very much still alive and working
b) they have just this week updated their website https://sparc.network
c) they have a new Twitter account (not yet updated on the website) https://twitter.com/sparc_team
d) they have a new Facebook page (also not on the website yet) https://www.facebook.com/sparcteam