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Energy Efficiency in Distributed Computing

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 6:04 am
by Contact
A lot of thought and math in this preprint research paper

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ism_Design

Abstract
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies have exploded in popularity in recent years. However, a huge amount of energy is consumed by many of these cryptocurrencies, exacerbating climate change, and most of the energy is used for computations which have no value other than securing the blockchain. In light of this fact, a number of cryptocurrencies were created with the intent of being secured by, or rewarding, useful computations.

In this paper, we design a reward mechanism for the distributed computing platform BOINC (the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which is used by many universities and other institutions around the world. The reward mechanism is separate from, but intended to be implemented on top of, a cryptocurrency protocol. The mechanism achieves the three main intended goals of the BOINC credit system via a multi-dimensional generalization of the proportional allocation reward mechanism of Bitcoin, and an anti-cheating mechanism adapted from an existing BOINC cheat-detecting mechanism. Since the generalization must be approximated , we introduce several ways of doing so, and analyze the game theoretic aspects of the approximation. One of these approximations requires a hardware profiling database, which has many use cases well beyond BOINC or cryptocurrencies.

We also explore market mechanisms that balance the preferences of BOINC users with the strengths of their machines using the well-known Top Trading Cycles algorithm and some of its generalizations, with the effect of increasing network output and energy efficiency. Additionally, we explore avenues to make the cryptocurrency carbon-neutral. We conclude with an overview of some existing cryptocurrencies that currently reward distributed computing.

Recently discussed on BOINC Radio
https://player.captivate.fm/episode/0d4 ... f68633c634
https://player.captivate.fm/episode/635 ... e70c66c5e/