A venture that started off as an institutional-grade quantitative buying and selling system for cryptocurrencies and shares has transitioned to grow to be a decentralized community sourcing GPU computing energy to serve growing demand for synthetic intelligence (AI) and machine studying (ML) companies.
Io.web has developed a check community that sources GPU computing energy from a wide range of knowledge facilities, cryptocurrency miners and decentralized storage suppliers. Aggregating GPU computational energy is touted to drastically scale back the price of renting these sources, which have gotten more and more costly as AI and machine studying advance.
Talking completely to Cointelegraph, CEO and co-founder Ahmad Shadid unpacks particulars of the community that goals to offer a decentralized platform for renting computing energy at a fraction of the price of centralized alternate options that presently exist.
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Shadid explains how the venture was conceived in late 2022 throughout a Solana hackathon. Io.web was growing a quantitative buying and selling platform that relied on GPU computing energy for its high-frequency operations however was hamstrung by the exorbitant prices of renting GPU computing capability.
The group unpacks the problem of renting high-performance GPU {hardware} in its core documentation, with the worth of renting a single Nvidia A100 averaging round $80 per day per card. Needing greater than 50 of those playing cards to function 25 days a month would value greater than $100,000.
An answer was discovered within the discovery of Ray.io, an open-source library that OpenAI used to distribute ChatGPT coaching throughout over 300,000 CPUs and GPUs. The library streamlined the venture’s infrastructure, with its backend developed within the quick area of two months.
Shadid demoed Io.web’s working testnet on the AI-focused Ray Summit in September 2023, highlighting how the venture aggregates computing energy, which is served to GPU customers as clusters to fulfill particular AI or machine studying use circumstances.
“Not solely does this mannequin permit Io.web to provision GPU compute as much as 90% cheaper than incumbent suppliers nevertheless it permits for just about limitless computing energy.”
The decentralized community is ready to leverage Solana’s blockchain to ship SOL (SOL) and USD Coin (USDC) funds to machine studying engineers and miners which are renting or offering computing energy.
“When ML engineers pay for his or her clusters, these funds are directed straight to the miners that served within the cluster with their GPUs, with a small community charge being allotted to the Io.web protocol.”
The venture’s roadmap is ready to incorporate the launch of a twin native token system that may characteristic IO and IOSD. The token mannequin will reward miners for executing machine studying workloads and sustaining community uptime whereas contemplating the greenback value of electrical energy consumption.
“The IO coin will likely be freely traded within the crypto market and is the gate to entry the compute energy, whereas the IOSD token will function a steady credit score token algorithmically pegged to 1 USD.”
Shadid advised Cointelegraph that Io.web essentially differs from centralized cloud companies like Amazon Internet Companies (AWS):
“To make use of an analogy, they’re United Airways and we’re Kayak; they personal planes, whereas we assist folks e-book flights.”
The founder added that any companies that require AI computation usually use third-party suppliers since they lack the GPUs to deal with all of it in-house. With demand for GPU’s estimated to extend by 10 instances each 18 months, Hadid stated that there’s usually inadequate capability to fulfill demand, resulting in lengthy wait instances and excessive costs.
That is compounded by what he describes as inefficient utilization of knowledge facilities that aren’t optimized for the kind of AI and machine studying work that’s quickly growing:
“There are literally thousands of unbiased knowledge facilities within the U.S. alone, with a mean utilization charge of 12%–18%. Because of this, bottlenecks are being created, which is having the knock-on impact of driving up costs for GPU compute.”
The upside is that the common cryptocurrency miner stands to achieve by renting out their {hardware} to compete with the likes of AWS. Hadid stated that the common miner utilizing a 40GB A100 makes $0.52 a day, whereas AWS is promoting the identical card for AI computing for $59.78 a day.
“A part of the worth proposition of Io.web is, first, we permit individuals to be uncovered to the AI compute market and resell their GPUs, and for the ML engineers, we’re considerably cheaper than AWS.”
Figures shared with Cointelegraph estimate that miners with GPU assets at their disposal may make 1,500% greater than they might from mining a wide range of cryptocurrencies.
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