Technology and computers have become integral parts of our daily lives. Tablets, smartphones, and even your watch interact with computers, which control the vast majority of home appliances. The processing power of today’s smartphones is comparable to that of the very first computers developed at the very beginning of the information technology revolution. Fun fact: the famed Cray-1 supercomputer, with its peak capability of 133 Mflops, is as powerful as a typical mobile phone today! However, the price differential is striking: $18 million for Cray–1 versus around $1,000 for a high-end mobile phone today.
The rate of technical progress in the modern world is dizzying. Intel introduced their first 1 teraflop PC processor in 2017 for $2,000. However, this strength alone is insufficient to tackle all of today’s complicated problems.
Summit, the legendary $200 million supercomputer with 200 petaflops of processing power, could handle the most mind-boggling jobs, yet it is rarely put to use in the real world. The vast majority of resources are allocated to military activities, such as the creation of ever more lethal weapons that can be deployed to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling elite.
Open Source Computing Resources For The Betterment Of Humanity
Now, let’s talk about those “less important activities” that don’t include creating weapons. Problems like global warming, humankind’s long-term survival, the hunt for alien life, and space exploration aren’t profitable, therefore investors tend to look elsewhere.
In the near future, it will be crucial to address the problem of limited access to computational resources. The ability to predict the effects of climate change, for example, will give our descendants a fighting chance on Earth and pave the way for their successful exploration of space. We really need to alter our terrible propensity for ignoring and dismissing everything that exists beyond our own lifetimes.
Over a decade ago, the number of PCs surpassed 1 billion, and it has been steadily rising ever since. Although most personal computers (PCs) have relatively low processing capabilities (80–100 GFLOPS), what if just 10% of that total were to be linked together in a single system? That’s enough to produce 10 million teraflops, or 50 times more power than the most powerful supercomputer currently available.
Modifications To Prior Agreements Required To Ensure A Win-Win
This concept has been around for a while. Already, there have been multiple attempts, but none of them have been fruitful enough. The initiative is probably the most well-known attempt to contact aliens. It had the potential to succeed in theory, but it failed to join a significant number of computers into a single network because it was based solely on excitement and had no rewards other than moral pleasure and rising electricity prices.
As a result, there is a pressing need for a system that does more than just pool resources; it also ensures that energy providers are fairly compensated.
The world needs a blockchain-based supercomputer that distributes its computing resources to those who need them in exchange for fair payments, rather than just performing pointless hash computations. This will benefit the node owners financially while also ensuring that computational resources are available to autonomous research teams and organizations.
In Other Words, Are These Plans legit?
Details matter a great deal. There are a lot of potential roadblocks, both technological and political, that could derail this worthy goal. And yet, this is one of the few things that can potentially fix the world’s currently intractable problems, so it’s definitely worth a shot.
