Next-Generation GPU Compute on the Blockchain: RNDR Beta Survey Results
In July, after we completed Phase II of our roadmap, the RNDR Network released a Beta Interest survey to help get a picture of GPU supply and demand for the Beta phase of our launch. The survey was quietly released to the RNDR community during a brief period towards the end of July and prior to major technology previews at SIGGRAPH 2018.
The results were astonishing, showcasing the power of a decentralized GPU compute network to scale exponentially faster than centralized structures.
RNDR Achieves Scale Greater than Centralized GPU Rendering Cloud
With over 1,100 responses, RNDR was able to accumulate over 14,000 unique GPU’s with a total OctaneBench power of over 1.5 million. The quality of the GPU’s was also very high, with over 40% of the GPU’s as premium cards.
Both Miner/Users
A key source of data from the survey was focused on users that both provide and consume rendering power on the network — miner/users. For this group, RNDR’s peer-to-peer architecture provides a new form of pure infrastructure elasticity that makes rendering ultra-high-resolution media more efficient. RNDR allows miner/users to contribute their idle GPU power to the network to earn tokens, which they can then use when they are on a deadline or need to augment their local GPU capacity with cloud nodes for high resolution jobs. Over 40% of survey respondents were both miner/users.
Within the demographic of miner/users, almost 50% plan to equally provide and consume GPU power, creating stability of supply and demand for the network within a peer-to-peer economy. There are additional economic efficiencies like minimizing GPU downtime and loss of potential production. For example, only 35% of miner/users routinely deployed more than 50% of their local rendering power, leaving roughly two-thirds of users with GPUs idle more than half of the time. Furthermore, over a third of users have their GPU capacity idle for more than 75% of the time.
Miner/users primarily want to accumulate RNDR rendering credits to use for scaling on deadline — with a third of these users incentivized to join RNDR in order to create elasticity from their local GPU power. An additional 25% wanted to use the network to increase ROI on their GPU investment, helping them justify new GPU CAPEX to increase their rendering capacity. Finally, greater speed accounted for nearly a quarter of users incentives to join RNDR.
Decentralization and Democratization
The survey results also highlighted a secondary advantage to RNDR’s decentralized architecture. In comparison to centralized clouds, the network is highly distributed regionally, with large-scale supply (over 100 nodes) in 4 different regions with medium-scale (25 -100) nodes in 8 regions, and beginnings of coverage in 13 different regions (5–25 nodes). This reduces latency and provides an always-on service, where overnight renders can be processed around the world at any time of day, increasing network efficiency.
A more distributed architecture also reduces centralization risks while opening new channels for independent artists and individual miners to generate economic efficiencies that make their workflows more productive. Traditionally, these are only seen in companies with large network effects.
The data shows that RNDR has the potential to make cloud rendering viable in independent workflows for the first time. 80% of RNDR miners are individual miners, while nearly 30% of expected miners using the RNDR network would be mining for the first time. We noticed similar results in our survey data on artists. 90% of these artists are independent or small studios who are looking for RNDR to provide faster and cheaper GPU cloud scaling.
As we build the RNDR Network into a sustainable two-sided economy for GPU providers and requesters, the team is focused on learning about community needs so that we can implement a user-centered design in advance of launch.
The survey was part of this effort: demonstrating RNDR’s potential to use decentralized peer-to-peer networking to achieve its mission to democratize GPU compute and build an economy of holographic media on the blockchain.
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