According to a recent series of Gartner Reports innovation is leading to digital disruption, new advanced data analytics, the explosion in cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and more. In this context blockchain technology is in its infancy with huge upside potential.
Next Generation Supercomputers
When thinking of next generation supercomputers on the exascale level, millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of processing cores will be needed to achieve "billion way" parallelism. The question is, with all the computing power on the globe, can there be a way to cobble together resources to allow distributed supercomputing?
Would it be possible to combine the benefits of blockchain technology and smart contracts to create a network with the computational power of an ExaFLOP supercomputer? Would this configuration overcome some of the disadvantages of a centralized supercomputing such as high energy consumption on the order of 100 megawatts and costing $100 million per year? Supercomputer experts believe ExaFLOP innovation will soon lead to supercomputing with energy consumption of just 25 megawatts and a $25 million price tag. Perhaps this price tag will be even lower with a distributed computing model.
Because supercomputers will be the only means by which to solve some of the world's most intractable problems such as the water crisis, climate change, disease, etc. the money spent would be well worth it.
The following image shows IBM Blue Gene supercomputer.
Image Courtesy Wikipedia: https://goo.gl/images/7Hk5bd
Today's Best Supercomputers Capable of .093 ExaFLOPs
A newest annual ranking of supercomputers by Top500 published in June 2017 lists two Chinese computers at the top of the list with a performance of 93 petabytes (Sunway TaihuLight) & 33.9 petabytes (Tianhe-2) per second respectively. This is the first year since 1996 the US didn't place a supercomputer in the top 3, although it placed 5 in the top 10.
The following graphic shows the general architecture of the Sunway TaihuLight system, today's fastest supercomputer.
Distributed Worldwide Supercomputing
Fog computing is at the heart of distributed worldwide computing. A fog network "is an architecture that uses collaborative end-user clients to carry out storage, communication, control, configuration, measurement and management" according to Jonathan Bar-Magen Numhauser of the University of Alcaia. It is precisely this architecture that is being adopted by Golem and SONM, among others, two new startups trying to make distributed supercomputing a reality.
Golem
Golem Network Tokens (GNT) are now priced at just $0.22. GNT & SONM were created to change the way computing is organized and carried out. A number of distributed computing networks have already been created but Golem is the first built on the blockchain.
Golem's idea is to use existing idle infrastructure around the world to do the work currently being done by supercomputers, mainframes and farms. Golem, which some are calling the Airbnb of for computing, is building a distributed supercomputer on Ethereum. Golem will use idle computing power of larger computers as well as the combined computing power of millions of personal computers. To use Golem users will pay for services using Golem coins. Golem's current market cap is more than $200 million and has sold more than 1 billion Golem Network Tokens (GNT).
According to Golem founder Julian Zawistowski "if you have a powerful gaming computer that you aren’t using all day, or a PC that you leave at the office each night you can rent your unused computing power to help someone who may need it for rendering graphics or developing complex applications."
Golem will soon release a software that will allow anyone, anywhere to lend their processing power Golem's global network. Experts believe if Golem is successful it won't happen until at least the mid-2020's as a mature version of Golem won't be available until then.
SONM
Supercomputer Organized by Network Computing (SONM) is similar to Golem and is priced at $0.035 on Coin Market Cap. SONM provides a white paper and a business overview. SONM seeks to do both general purpose computing and scientific calculations on their global distributed network.
