NuNet opens up the world’s hidden computing infrastructure
SingularityNET and its family of spinoffs are constructing a world where advanced machine intelligence is available to anyone globally, regardless of their location, race, religion, or other factors. We envision a planetary network free from centralized control, acting as a public good.
NuNet is a key component of this vision – no software exists without the metal it runs on, and NuNet makes sure the decentralized AI applications can find the computing resources they need to run. Currently, complex computational workflows normally use commercial cloud computing, with Amazon’s Web Services holding the largest market share.
Canalys reported (PDF) in April 2021 that Amazon alone holds 32% of the cloud computing market share, Microsoft another 19%, and Google another 7%. These companies currently dominate the industry because they can achieve economies of scale, allowing them to offer computing cheaply and flexibly. NuNet doesn’t necessarily try to replace this existing centralized cloud infrastructure with end-user devices; instead it throws the doors open to everyone to be a cloud provider. Anyone with computing resources can use NuNet’s APIs and adapters to offer their resources to people with computational workflows to run. This enables a global multi-sided marketplace of computing, a marketplace that is more open, less locked down by economic giants than the current cloud computing marketplace.
Untapped computing resources
While people increasingly get their computing from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s centralized wells of computing resources, abundant computing resources lie untapped at the edges of the network. These resources are the unused capacity of personal computers, mobile phones and other devices.
It’s hard to accurately estimate the amount of computing power latent in devices owned by private individuals and distributed over the world (we will explore the numbers in a future blog), but it exceeds the fastest supercomputers by orders of magnitude. There are over seven billion mobile devices in the world, and 50% of households have PCs. Mobile devices that contain over a teraflop of computing have been available at least since 2015. Alongside personal computers, IoT devices, supercomputers, servers, data centers, and even cars represent an immeasurable unutilized computing resource, sitting there just waiting to be used.
These untapped resources represent huge economic value. Some of the most successful startups of recent years have provided the software that connects an untapped resource with buyers: AirBNB launching people’s spare rooms onto the marketplace, Uber turning idle cars into money-makers, etc. One can say what AirBNB did for your spare room, NuNet does for your spare RAM, (and CPU and network connection).
Shortcomings of current cloud computing
There are gaps in the current state of global computing infrastructure that can only be solved by the flexible, decentralized technology that NuNet envisions, which does not involve locking in customers and their data in a silo, but on the contrary – letting the data move around the network, across different participating devices with different owners, limited only by the privacy settings imposed by the owner of the data.
NuNet consists of a series of lightweight adapters that allow computers to be discovered by the decentralized cloud computing network, and an API of APIs that links various agents in the ecosystem. This technology has the potential to break down the garden walls of centralized hubs of computing power, allowing code to flow over both centralized and decentralized hardware.
Currently, if a business needs to implement a complex computing workflow (for instance, training a GPT-3 model) they will typically use either their own hardware, or a centralized cloud provider, or a combination of both. Furthermore, centralized services often come with unfavourable privacy policies that allow them to gain control of enormous amounts of data and gather it in very few hands. (Data sovereignty will be discussed in more detail in a later blog.)
Businesses using multiple cloud providers (e.g. Microsoft and Amazon) run into other problems. These clouds aren’t built to interface with each other; it’s not in the companies’ interest to allow them to interface. To create a workflow that uses multiple cloud providers usually requires a custom solution, driving up development time and costs to a level that’s prohibitive for smaller organizations.
We can do better than this. It is possible – using new and emerging technologies in communication, mobile, distributed computing, and blockchain – to create an open and interoperable computing universe across which workflows can run in an integrated and optimized manner. NuNet will be bringing the edge resources into play effectively, and also allow easy workflows across on-site hardware and multiple cloud providers.
Demand for computing
Gartner expects the cloud computing market to grow at an annual rate of 6.3% from the $242 billion it stood at in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, brought a trend towards remote work and a move towards web-based solutions that accelerated the growth of cloud computing, but was not the main driver.
The Gartner report notes that this demand is being driven by “customers’ preference of elastic, pay-as-you-go consumption models.” Elasticity – the ability to automatically scale your resources to your current requirements, while only paying for what you need – is one of NuNet’s key design principles.
NuNet
NuNet’s mission is to equip the future with a global computing infrastructure built for intelligence, flexibility and efficiency. The AI revolution shouldn’t depend on a few tech giants for computing resources – these resources should be an integral, ubiquitous feature of the network.
The building blocks of a global, decentralized computing and data economy are in place today: there is decentralized computing hardware in the form of billions of end-user devices with spare computation and storage capacity. There is efficient, cheap, and abundant centralized computation in data centres, waiting to be tapped by an appropriate API. There is big and growing demand for computation from software services, web applications, and others, including the incipient global Artificial Intelligence incubated by SingularityNET.
NuNet cements these building blocks together into a new co-operative market. This model has certain emergent properties that centralized cloud computing can’t match. These will be explored in more detail in future blogs, and some are discussed in our whitepaper, but to give a quick survey of some of NuNet’s features –
- The ability to route particular computational tasks to specific hardware, e.g. graphical tasks to GPUs;
- The ability to support any business process and workflow;
- The ability to adapt to changing technologies and computing needs (e.g. incorporate quantum and neuromorphic computing infrastructures in the future);
- Ability to organize extremely complex compute processes, ones that involve many computing steps, many data sources, and novel combinations of these. Some very high-value business customers use complex workflows, combining data in ways not possible using traditional commercial cloud computing services;
- Eventually, harnessing the possibilities of AI engines, multiple data sources and ubiqutous connectivity, to intelligently and automatically organize computations with minimal human intervention;
NuNet is a multi-sided marketplace, a kind of machine-to-machine digital economy of connected devices, algorithms and data, with algorithms making multi-token microtransactions on the blockchain to pay for hardware costs and data sources. Owners of computational hardware, AI and software developers, data controllers and user communities are all important components of a network of people trading their resources.
We believe we can build a successful multi-sided platform by making it easy for all participants to interact. Therefore, the short-term goal of the NuNet Foundation is to create our API of APIs that allows users to launch and discover computing resources with a minimum of friction.
With easy communication and the proper incentives, NuNet can achieve rapid growth, onboarding as much computational capacity as possible onto our network as quickly as possible. This, in turn, will maximize competitiveness, and drive down overall costs.
NuNet brings together categories of people including buyers who want cheap computing power, sellers looking to earn additional income from their spare compute capacity on mobile phones, personal computers, IoT devices, and private and public cloud infrastructures , and owners of these devices who want to donate their resources for beneficial usage. These participants together form a marketplace where they exchange computing resources to earn NuNet tokens under customizable conditions.
NuNet will also integrate data providers, allowing workflows to request data, and allowing you to get paid for beneficial data you can provide to other participants. Developers and organizations will register their AI, data science or ML workflows to NuNet, and these run these workflows on devices provided by compute providers, using data provided by data providers, and discovered and used by NuNet platform consumers. The handling of data will be discussed in future blogs.
Imagine an open-source AI algorithm from SingularityNET being immediately available to thousands of production workflows that flow in parallel on a global network. As these workflows consume computational resources, smart contracts settle crypto transactions between consumers, providers and operators. Imagine being able to define any business logic or task to be sent to AI algorithms, backed by permissioned data and best available hardware.
Any decentralized computing platform, storage solution, data sharing framework, or AI marketplace can be integrated into the NuNet ecosystem. Instead of computational workflows being confined in one walled garden, NuNet allows them to flow all over the network, optimally routed, bringing economic and computational benefits wherever they go.
About NuNet: NuNet lets anyone share and monetize their computing resources, turning cloud computing power from a centralized service into an open protocol powered by blockchain. Join our community via:
