Zennet is a public, distributed, and decentralized Supercomputer

Apps
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It is the brainchild of Ohad Asor ‘Software and Mathematical Development Consultant & Contractor’ Tel Aviv, Israel

Zennet is a public, distributed, and decentralized Supercomputer. Computation power is traded on Zennet 's open market platform. Anyone can rent computation power and use it to run arbitrary tasks. Anyone can monetize their hardware by offering unused computation power for sale.

Zennet allows Publishers who need computation power to run arbitrary computational tasks. Computation power is supplied by Providers for a negotiated fee. A free-market infrastructure brings Publishers and Providers together. Publishers can hire many computers and run whatever they want on them safely, thanks to cutting-edge virtualization technology. Payment is continuous and frictionless, thanks to Blockchain technology, among other technologies that shall be discussed later on.

The network is 100% distributed and decentralized: there is no central entity of any kind, just like Bitcoin. All software will be open source. Publishers pay Providers directly, there is no middleman. Accordingly, there are no payable commissions, except for regular transaction fees which are being paid to XenCoin miners.

It is a totally free market: all participants are free to pay or charge by any rate they want. There are no restrictions. Hence, we put additional focus on customizability. We allow advanced participants to control all parameters and conditions of their nodes in a versatile way. On the other hand, simplicity and automation are made possible by making the client software implement automatic risk-reward considerations by default. In addition, we present a novel pricing model.

How It Works

Find Each Other

  • A Publisher announces his need for worker nodes on the
    blockchain
  • A Provider in search of employment looks for these announcements on
    the blockchain

Shake On It

  • When a matching announcement is found, the Provider and Publisher
    negotiate a contract.
  • The Publisher places an initial fund in the Provider’s account and
    locks it. The publisher will place additional funds in the account in
    accordance with the work done.

Start Working

  • The Provider creates a Virtual Machine on his device
  • The Publisher gets control over the VM from the Provider. He can then
    frequently check the progess, and terminate the connection at will

Introduction to Zennet Supercomputer

Zennet Supercomputer

Zennet Presentation and Q&A

Zennet Presentation and Q&A - YouTube

General Flow

The following summarizes the general idea of the software’s communication protocol between publisher A and provider B:

  1. Publisher A broadcasts an announcement (ann) to the blockchain,
    saying it is seeking providers. The ann contains information about
    the required systems in terms of hardware capabilities, and the
    publisher’s IP address.
  2. Provider B polls on the blockchain. Once an ann that matches its
    filter is found, it connects to A’s IP address.
  3. A and B verify each others’ identity by challenging their keys,
    which are the key pair of their blockchain addresses.
  4. B sends A information about its hardware capabities.
  5. A and B negotiate the price and form a contract.
  6. A and B initiate the Micropayments protocol. B signs a refund
    transaction and A deposits coins in a 2-of-2 multisig address. B
    awaits confirmation.
  7. B creates a virtual machine and gives A SSH control over it.
  8. Every few seconds, both A and B read accumulated usage measurements.
    They use the Micropayment protocol to transfer coins according to
    the measurements and the contract terms.

The following sketch summarizes the above process (Note: the step numbering in the diagram is different from the above list!):

The process described is a summary, and only covers the general principles. Many open questions may still remain, some of these are addressed in detail below. But first, some technical background about the Zennet environment.

The system’s building blocks consist of new-generation virtualization technologies (e.g. docker), benchmarking technologies (e.g. phoronix-test-suite), an improved Blockchain technology, and a novel protocol. Zennet includes the following software components:

  • A Linux distribution (zennet-os), to be installed on either bare
    metal or in a Hypervisor (such as VirtualBox or Qemu), with
    Zennet code to manage Docker containers and collect measurements.
  • A client software (zennet d and zennet -qt) that configures and
    manages the zennet -vm according to the preferences of publishers and
    providers.
  • A blockchain (xencoind and xencoin-qt), implementing XenCoin as a
    cryptocurrency, being used as tokens to use computing machines.

Docs are here

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Do I smell an arbitrage opportunity here :wink:

I’ll rent your Zennet to power my SAFEnet…

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Depends on whether you need a blockchain to do this, which seems unlikely. If not, it’ll be a lot more efficient as a native SAFE app - no fees, no transaction delays, no scalability risks etc.

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I’ve worked at CERN in the run up to the launch of the Large Hadron Collider. CERN implemented project GRID to decentralize computations on the massive data generated by the experiment. Crucially we moved the computation to where the data lives, because it is near impossible to move the data to your computation capability.

In Zennet you need to yourself divide the computational work into small bits, and move your data to these rented nodes.

I’ve said this many times, the reason I joined MaidSafe is because you first need to decentralize the data before you can decentralize the computation.

A nice proposal with a lot of value, nonetheless !

EDIT: actually GRID is more a worldwide scheduler for computational jobs on a network of hierarchical data copies, each lower tier a more reduced version of the original data - just for the sake of being more correct

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Added a presentation from the inventor Ohad Asor, there’s certainly no shortage of folk having a crack. None of them seemed to have gone on voyages to far off places for inspiration though :wink:

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Hey BenMS,

I do not see your need to maintain all the data throughout the calculation process, and the calculation results are certainly sufficient for the needs of scientific research and development.
On Zennet you can store or do anything else, including the stop of the calculation process if needed for specific modifications.
more then that…the owning & keeping of data centers with administrators of those data centers is approximately constant-expensive-cost.
Zennet has no keep cost.
Zennet has no administrators cost.
Zennet eliminates the dictatorship of many more expensive cost-leeches.
Zennet pricing algorithm, a welcome novelty, designed for decentralized computation purposes while the billing will stay fair.
The differential property, in Zennet billing case, is describing your scientific calculation process.
The differential property, in other billing cases, are riding on a step function made by constant-expensive-cost billing contributions

All the best,

A.

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Would this protocol allow for a trustless computing connection which could perform computing with extremely low latency requirements (less than 100ms)

See our discussion about the need for low latency computer for an MMORPG.

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Not sure myself, but you could ask on their ‘community’ bitcointalk page

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@Arielinuxx I see you know a bit about Zennet. I haven’t looked into it but reading the summary it seems to be about creating a decentralised market for OS containers? This is much better than what we have now! I’m curious though because that approach seems to incentivise centralisation - do you know what measures are used to mitigate this and maintain the required decentralisation?