Computes: How does it work?

Computes is a decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer mesh computer. Here’s a sneak peak “under the hood” to see how it works.

When most people think about decentralized technology, they immediately think blockchain. We chose to take a different path due to several concerns with the current state of blockchain technologies:

• The blockchain is currently too slow for supercomputing. At the time of our evaluations, Ethereum was running at approximately a dozen transactions per second.
• The overhead of storing and synchronizing blockchain transactions on edge devices was too high especially for IoT and mobile devices.
• Proof of Work (PoW) computations are unnecessary for B2B supercomputing. Why waste CPU and GPU cycles on PoW computations when they could be used for computations such as cancer research?

Computes is built on our own DAG-based (directed acyclic graph) “blockless ledger” technology and decentralized queuing system called Lattice. Everything is written in go-lang to be super efficient and run on any operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux, and VMs). Lattice leverages IPFS as its DAG, P2P file system, messaging system, and mesh network.

Besides being fault tolerant, the most interesting part about Lattice is its ability to organize serial and parallel computations as well as run itself — tasks can create other tasks. Also with the help of Docker containers, Computes is able to support computations in any programming language as well as support custom environments such as TensorFlow and Caffe!

If you were one of the fortunate first 600 developers in the beta queue, you received a license key along with our Getting Started github link that walks you through submitting computes to Lattice and checking results. It also walks you through chaining tasks for machine learning serial computations.

We subsequently released a demo bash script to further automate a developer’s interaction with Lattice.

We also provided additional instruction how to build and run your own AI algorithms on Lattice.

We released another important article entitled, “Decentralized APIs”. This article highlights the local REST APIs provided by the Computes Daemon. These APIs could be used for building your own decentralized apps (Dapps) on top of Computes (without the need for a blockchain)!

Interested in learning what computes.com can do for your business? Contact us at hello@computes.com.

Stay tuned to this blog for more exciting information about our new technology stack and development progress! You can also reach us on Twitter, Facebook, and GitHub.