Why we are launching NuNet
The Global Economy of Decentralized Computing.
Currently, the global computing market is primarily controlled by brand name ‘cloud’ providers, such as Amazon WS, Google Compute Engine, MS Azure, and software-as-a-service providers, such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP. These titans of industry are able to provide tightly integrated solutions for data storage, processing, machine learning, and AI services. Due to the competitiveness of the cloud computing industry, the unique benefits that these cloud providers are able to provide oftentimes become isolated. Meaning, for example, that Google Compute engine processes and workflows cannot easily integrate with Amazon Web Services computing pipelines, thereby halting many of the synergies that would be available if the services were interoperable.
At a high level, this isolation has made sense from a competitive dynamic and efficiency perspective. For most of computing’s history, it has been more computationally efficient to concentrate computing resources within a single geographical location. However, the business model of redirecting computing demand towards central ‘supercomputing’ hubs is nearing an end. As technology progresses and massive amounts of data begin to be collected at the edges of networks, it is important to consider alternative computing architectures that take advantage of these new forms of computing (such as mobile devices). Innovative societies are collectively developing new and powerful computing resources, and it is important for traditional concepts and tools to keep pace with exponential innovation.
Distributed computing offers new solutions to traditional problems in computing, and may be better suited for stream computing, microservice architectures, and IoT ecosystems. These ecosystems logically manage and execute workflows across different machines in different geographical locations. This geographic dispersion presents problems to centrally processed computing workflows. Distributed computing at the edge will be necessary to reduce workload burdens of central ‘supercomputing’ hubs, which should only be used and reserved for the most intensive workflows.
As the world moves towards distributed computing, it will be important to add an economic layer that allows for devices to trade computing and data amongst themselves. Distributed ledger and related technologies, can allow for this type of network to be built and help distributed computing reaching its full potential. An ecosystem that possesses both an efficient value exchange mechanism and vibrant willing distributed computing nodes can begin to generate new computing interactions between agents. Such networks will allow faster and more efficient micropayment exchanges to develop amongst individual computing processes and microservices and can be designed to have minimal to zero human intervention for decision support.
Introducing NuNet
Realizing that traditional computing architectures will not be able to provide all society’s future computing needs, NuNet has stepped-up to develop a computing platform solution that is capable of optimally providing globally distributed computing power and storage for decentralized networks.
We call this platform NuNet: The Global Economy of Decentralized Computing.
NuNet’s platform will provide an interoperability layer that connects owners of data and computing resources with computational processes that demand them. NuNet will be a versatile network that will encompass mobile consumer devices, edge computing, IoT devices, PCs, servers, and data centers. The platform will allow for seamless interoperability among all its components and the automation of workflow design. Furthermore, NuNet’s platform will integrate existing decentralized computing and storage frameworks into a truly global meta-network, which will enable better and more diverse usage of the world’s computing resources.
NuNet’s platform will prioritize practicality and ease of use for both the owners of computing and storage resources and those who create computational processes.
For resource owners, connecting to NuNet will be as simple as making their resources available on NuNet’s marketplace, as well as potentially specifying restrictions/goals of the resource’s utilization and the asked price in tokens.
For computational process owners, the process won’t be any harder. They will just need to ensure the NuNet platform is aware of the computational resources needed by the process and what is available on the platform, defining parameters such as required computational and storage capacity, data input format, reliability, security, and other meta-data..
Our Future Plans
The NuNet foundation has been formed with the awareness of a variety of other decentralized platforms that could mesh into our platform. Together these partners will allow NuNet to progress toward the realization of the platform. In relation to the immediate outlook of our platform, NuNet is being developed in close relation to SingularityNET, and other members of the Decentralized AI Alliance.
The recent development of new decentralized computing resource platforms has been one of the main drivers for the creation of NuNet. Here is a very quick glimpse of some of the platforms we’ve identified to become in the future, part of the NuNet framework.
● Golem: A decentralized marketplace for computing power;
● Ocean Protocol: An ecosystem for the data economy and associated services, with a tokenized service layer that securely exposes data, storage, compute and algorithms for consumption;
● iExec: Blockchain-based virtual cloud computing and data renting framework;
● Enigma: A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private; ● IPFS: A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open;
● Filecoin: A decentralized storage marketplace that achieves staggering economies of scale by allowing anyone worldwide to participate as storage providers. It also makes storage resemble a commodity or utility by decoupling hard-drive space from additional services. On this robust global market the price of storage will be driven by supply and demand, not corporate pricing departments, and miners will compete on factors like reputation for reliability as well as price;
● Storj Labs: decentralized cloud storage;
NuNet is just at the beginning of its journey. You can read our whitepaper here. To support the work of the team and remain update with NuNet developments, join our Telegram Community, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook.
