Blockchain combined with cloud can revolutionise how organisations manage and acquire resources

Reports estimate that the cloud services market will reach a whooping US$411 billion by the year 2020. This exponential growth is largely owing to the constant rise in demand for cloud-based services. The recent massive adoption of cloud-based server applications and mobile apps are prime catalysts to this rise in demand.

However, what’s noteworthy here is the fact as this demand rises continuously, the need for cloud infrastructure services like data centres becomes of crucial importance. These infrastructure services have to remain constant, reliable and efficient to ensure adequate back-end management. And as they run to ensure seamless operations, they also require computing power on a much larger scale for efficient provision of services.

The demand for computing power isn’t restricted to the cloud services market alone — other industries such as the entertainment and gaming industries also require computing power on a very large scale. “There are many different uses of computing power during the production of modern games, including scenes and game maps.

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For example, the Unreal game engine takes hours, even with a cluster of machines, just to adjust shading renders of content, scenes, lighting and animations,” says Sean Barger, founder and CEO of CPUcoin. Barger is also a highly successful video game producer with over 55 entertainment software titles which includes the renowned and legendary original Tetris game thus his comment on the gaming industry comes from a sound professional perspective.

The entertainment media industry is another major sector that relies heavily on computing power especially when it comes to the production of movies with Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI). “Movie CGI requires massive processing power to complete a detailed rendering of the calibre we see today on the big screen. These can take thousands of machines to achieve in a reasonable amount of time. There are multiple scenarios that require high volume computing power, including the transcoding and streaming of 4k or 8k video content for re-purposed applications and finalizing video rendering tasks,” says Barger.

To cater to these computing power demands especially in the cloud services market, solutions like Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) have been offered to facilitate and enhance computing power and resources. Data centres created to help organizations manage data without having to set up their own physical infrastructure. These data centres are also expensive to run with several hidden costs of operation. There’s also a huge risk if the cloud services fail as businesses that rely on them could lose huge amounts of data or miss important deadlines.

Computing power wastage undermines cost maximisation

Reports in the past have shown that nearly US$30 billion worth of idle servers (about 30 per cent of the servers deployed worldwide) sit in data centres unused. This does not include the enormous infrastructure costs incurred in ensuring these data centres run smoothly. This is a tremendous waste of unused computational power and resources.

Having nearly 30 per cent of the world’s deployed servers laying dormant in data centres in an era where every effort seems to be made to ensure resources are properly maximized, through recycling and other means, presents an incredible opportunity to more effectively maximize these resources.

One option for maximization would be to allow sharing of unused computing power across different cloud services, corporate data centres, and even powerful home computers while still maximizing their profits and helping to minimize the eco-footprint on the planet. This is achieved through the effective use of already existing equipment rather than an ever-expanding cloud landscape akin to being the solar company for CPU/GPU power.

Enterprises can still have their fail-over configurations in their networks, staging, and development machines, however, these machines which are proven to be used only 2 per cent of the time, can now be doing productive work for others while reducing the owner/subscriber’s via a massive secondary market.

Creating a computational sharing economy via blockchain

What blockchain can offer is a platform where unused CPU power is shared with other users, enterprises or services for rewards and benefits. This way, an ecosystem is created that avoids the waste of resources by offsetting current costs or enabling new revenue streams for consumers to utilize their dormant computing power.

Barger’s CPUcoin is already incorporating blockchain to create such an ecosystem. Having a depth of understanding concerning the demand for computational power and the lasting solution needed, CPUcoin creates a Content Generation Network (CGN) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering. The framework will pay any person or platform that allows CPUcoin to use the idle time of servers, mobile devices and PC computers.

Subsequently, CPUCoin will pull together these unused resources and restructure them into a vast, highly scalable, reliable, edge-capable, CDN-compatible (Content Delivery Network), robust network of highly available computing resources. This infrastructure will then be leased in the form of a distributed services delivery infrastructure to the operators of cloud-based applications, who will use these powerful, convenient and reliable systems to operate their services at scale and at a fraction of the cost than the available conventional methods.

This will facilitate a rapid reduction in cloud infrastructure costs by providing a new sharing economy for unutilized CPU/GPU power. The CGN effectively eliminates the hassle and high expenses associated with provisioning, managing and scaling applications on a global scale.

“We are focused on enterprise-class, just-in-time delivery, therefore, the system is architected to connect to existing server technologies for quickly decentralizing any application, and provide automatic scaling and elimination of provisioning. There are countless uses for CPUcoin’s sharing economy, and we are making it easy for any industry to pivot from existing infrastructures to the new backend we provide with very little friction,” says Barger.

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An important phenomenon for nearly all organizations is how costs of operation can be reduced or maximized. Hence, creating a decentralized sharing economy for computing power facilitates this cost reduction and maximization as revenue can be generated from unused resources.

Users who also make use of these compute resources have the opportunity to pay only for what they have consumed or used up, a somewhat Pay-as-You-Go system. This way, additional costs incurred in securing compute resources that are not needed will be eliminated.

From a sustainability perspective, this decentralized approach fosters a recycling economy when unused power can be shared with other platforms or users thus, generally saving unnecessary costs used to set up additional facilities and on wastage.

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