Blockchain Backed Computations

Imagine for a moment that all computed scientific results and data are globally accessible by everybody and not only by well financed research institute. Imagine further that you can verify and reuse parts, or all, of this results, without the need to have access to a supercomputer. All you need is your laptop and an internet connection. What would you do with such power? How fast would that accelerate scientific progress?

If you have read the previous articles of this publication you are familiar with the disruptive power of blockchain technology and you have also read about my other project Distributed Hosting. This article is a teaser about my second blockchain-based project, a Distributed Computation Engine.

In the past supercomputer, Grids and nowadays the Cloud has given us cheap and intermediate access to as much computation power as we need, at least for most computations. Based on Moore’s law the available computation power will increase at a fast pace.

For scientific research and computations it is essential to produce verifiable, reusable and reproducible results. After all, that are scientific principles. In practice this is most time not so easy. Beside technical, there are also organizational and bureaucratic hurdles.

Yet another computation framework, that will be deployed on some internal cloud, grid or supercomputer, will not solve this problem. We need something that allows interoperability between organizations, without central authority. Something that is public and can be verified by everybody without to re-execute the whole computation. Something that keeps track about each computation, in such a way that it is scalable, but also reusable and referencable. Exactly, a public ledger aka. blockchain that includes requested and executed computations. A kind of public computation marketplace.

The Distributed Computation Engine project develops the scientific basis for such a blockchain. Additional a specification with related reference implementation will be provided.

Stay tuned for more information or contact me directly if you want to know more about it.