“It takes collaboration across a community to develop better skills for better lives.” OECD Secretary General Jose Angel Gurria.
One cannot underestimate the power of the community to foster development and prosperity. Safety in numbers, even. A communal structure has been the mainstay of human progress since the dawn of time. People are always better and safer together.
Blockchain technology takes the issue of community-driven power to the next level, through its core principle of decentralization.
Decentralized protocols take advantage of the power of every individual user across
the blockchain community and create one single entity yielding tremendous computing power without having to rely on one central hub that can be easily exploited or monopolized.
The trait of decentralization makes blockchain technology the perfect candidate for
opening up new avenues for business and progress.
Distributed Cloud Computing (DCC): the problem and the solution
There is inherent power within the community and decentralized protocols make full
use of such energy to combine into a source of quasi-limitless computing capacity.
The yielded power can be channeled and utilised for a huge variety of tasks. Indeed, blockchain technology has penetrated a diverse array of industry sectors, from manufacturing to medical, agriculture to media, and banking, the world of tomorrow will be permeated by the power of blockchain.
The problem: utilize idle computing capacity to attain a common objective
The issue of idle computer power worldwide has been largely overlooked in recent
years. Until the advent of the blockchain, immense amounts of computing capacity
remained untapped.
And this power continues to grow exponentially. As more and more devices come online, joining in the global IoT environment, the amount of idle power will grow too.
In a DCC environment, every single computer node coordinates with thousands or millions of other nodes to create a robust, yet decentralized grid with a common goal.
The solution: harness the power of DCC into an integrated blockchain platform
DCC takes advantage of Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), which enables trusted hardware devices to work together with a shared objective.
There are a number of blockchain platforms operating in the Cloud computing field.
While these enterprises share the goal of harnessing power through a Cloud environment, there are subtle but important differences in how they operate.
iExec, for instance, is creating a marketplace for Cloud computing, whereby computing power can be traded between users and Cloud providers. The iExec platform is based on the Ethereum blockchain, and it intends to provide Decentralized Apps (DApps) access to the computing power they require.
DeepCloud AI is another such player. Its platform is also based on the Ethereum blockchain, and much like iExec, DeepCloud is a marketplace to rent and trade idle
computing power.
There are other companies that offer far more nuanced platforms. Ankr, for instance, is involved in the Cloud computing environment, fielding a project that fully utilizes SGX technology through a Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) protocol.
PoUW is a clear level above earlier ideas, such as Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) concept.
Whereas PoW utilizes huge computational power to resolve individual mathematical
quandaries that yield little, if any, benefit to the larger community. Ankr’s PoUW channels that power (up to 99%) to resolve problems for the greater good of the community, rather than the individual.
iExec and DeepCloud may very well succeed in their own right, but Ankr’s versatility (PouW is executed directly in the CPU, thus bypassing the constraints imposed by smart contracts), reliability via SGX, scalability, security through Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) all combine into creating a significantly enhanced Cloud ecosystem.
Conclusion
DCC technology is an emerging trend that paves the way for the utilization of all that idle computing power from around the world.
Cloud computing infrastructure aims to create a unified approach to solve the problem of rising requirements of computing power worldwide. As IoT continues its expansion, more and more computers, smartphones, and other devices will come online, drawing power from dwindling sources.
Cloud computing will meet these demands through enhanced security, resilience, and
scalability.
