Over the past year or so I’ve been hearing a lot about a new use of blockchain technology to deploy a compute cloud.
In the old days, mining crypto would reward you for doing the work. But over time, it’s become harder to mine and to make money from crypto. Specialized hardware took over more of this activity making it much less profitable for the rest of us
But with the emergence of crypto distributed compute clouds, this maybe changing. Akash is a relatively popular one, but I read an article in ScienceDaily about the use of the Golem network to implement a search for earth’s chemistry precursors that led to life (see: Chemists use the blockchain to simulate … the origins of life) which was was describing a CHEM open access paper Emergence of metabolic-like cycles in blockchain-orchestrated reaction networks.
The science
The science was intended to simulate chemical reactions based on chemicals available to primitive earth to determine which reaction chain(s) could lead to life. They programmed the set of reactions and the chemicals available (water, methane, & ammonia) to early earth and intended to let this run and generate all possible reaction cycles.
The researchers realized that doing this much computation would require more compute power than available to them. So they decided to deploy the computations across a distributed compute cloud. They chose the Golem Network to do their computations. Their computations ultimately resulted a reaction cycle database they called the Network of Early Life (NOEL) (see: NOEL Network).
Once the distributed cloud compute was in operation they used it to come up with 11B reaction cycles of which ~5B would “entail no incompatibilities or selectivity conflicts”. They then used these to construct a series of metabolic network 100K larger than ever produced before as depicted in NOEL.
Using NOEL, the team was able to discover some standard metabolic pathways (reaction cycles) and a limited set that produced simple sugars and amino acids could emerge from the chemicals available to primitive earth.
But they also found about a 100 reaction cycles that involved self-replicating molecules (molecules that could create additional copies of themselves). Self replicating molecules is also believed to be a requirement for the origin of life.
It turned out that the work to construct NOEL on the Golem network took 400 machines, over 20K cores and two months to do the calculations. The cost to them was 82K GLMs (at ~0.21 GLM/USD this would be $17.2K). The team estimated it would have required a top of the line AMD 256 core server about 6 months to compute which would have cost substantially more to purchase and of course running it for 6 months would cost even more.
The team chose Golem, because the work only needed to be available in the form of docker containers, didn’t require the central work server to be online constantly, automatically matched the compute with cloud resource, and managed it all using a cryptographically secure and distributed interface.
Distributive compute cloud
The science is interesting but what’s more interesting (to me) is it was done using a crypto distributed computing cloud.
Looking at the Golem network statistics they show ~510 compute providers with about 5000 cores available of which 50-100 providers supplied computing use to the cloud over the past 4 hrs (26Jan2024: 1600 MDT). That doesn’t seem like a lot of providers but each could have multiple servers running compute.
The Golem network provides a relatively straightforward tutorial on how to set up a server to supply compute to the network. There are some tricks (port forwarding, screen/tmux deployment) but it all seems pretty straight forward (probably something even I could do in an hour or so).
And when you start supplying compute to Golem mainnet, you earn GLMs which are a cryptocurrency (ERC20 coin of ETH). So one should easily be able to convert GLM to ETH and whatever currency you desire.
Many former crypto miners have idle servers that could be put to use providing resources to distributed compute clouds. And if I thought doing so might help some (under resourced organization) produce real scientific research, I might be even more tempted to do so.
~~~~
So if you’ve got some servers sitting idle in your (home) office. This weekend, fire them back up, install the Golem provider software and run the Golem network. Who knows by doing so, you just might help some researcher someplace change the world.
Picture credit(s):
- From the CHEM Emergence of metabolic-like cycles in blockchain-orchestrated reaction networks article
- From the Golem stats page