What Is Golem?

There are many blockchain-based projects in development which have the potential to transform certain aspects of our daily lives. The Golem project, for example, certainly has a lot of merit. Creating a global decentralized supercomputer is not an easy feat, though. So far, the team has made some big progress toward bringing this project to market, but there is still a long way to go. Now is a good time to see what Golem is really all about.

A Brief Overview of the Golem Project

People who have been keeping an eye on technological developments as of late may have noticed how supercomputers are very popular right now. Thanks to their massive processing capacity, these machines can complete tasks most companies and researchers would struggle with for months, if not years. Building a supercomputer is very expensive, though, especially because there is so much hardware that needs to be purchased. Moreover, engineers must create an operating system which connects all of these pieces together and allows them to operate as one unit.

This is where Golem comes into the picture, as it does things a bit differently. Instead of creating a new supercomputer housed at a particular location and only accessible to the elite, Golem is a global and open source decentralized supercomputer network. Anyone in the world will be able to access all of these computing resources for whatever task they wish to complete. It is a very different approach, but there is a lot of merit to taking the decentralized route.

Furthermore, this new decentralized supercomputer will be built in a completely new manner. Since there is no hardware in just one specific location, users from all over the world can contribute excess computing capacity to Golem. This turns the project into an on-demand supercomputer, rather than one which is always running at full capacity. Moreover, it also ensures this decentralized supercomputer can scale over time, which is something traditional computers of this magnitude struggle with right now.

The ability to use the Golem project for specific purposes is another aspect which needs to be highlighted. Given the decentralized nature of this project, it works slightly differently from how one would expect. The system is already capable of completing a wide variety of tasks including CGI rendering and machine learning. If software creators come up with different tasks for Golem, the decentralized supercomputer will be capable of handling any computing task in the world. Whether or not such use cases will be developed specifically for this project is a different matter altogether.

Users who share their computing resources with the Golem project will be rewarded in Golem Network Tokens, or GNT. Right now, this token has a market value of US$0.96, although the price will change depending on how much demand there is for the Golem ecosystem in the years to come. All transactions between providers and requesters are settled using the Ethereum blockchain. Moreover, computations made through the Golem project will be fully isolated from the hosts’ systems to avoid any unnecessary friction.

Right now, the Golem team is preparing to unveil their first iteration of this decentralized supercomputer. The Brass Golem release is scheduled for early 2018 and will offer CGI rendering capabilities. Later this year, the team will add GPU support and integration with mainstream commercial rendering software. A lot of things have yet to be developed and implemented, but so far, the Golem project is shaping up quite nicely. It is not the only project focusing on this market, though, and the first-mover advantage is there for the taking.