Golem is a decentralized computing power rental platform built on the Ethereum platform. It is committed to building a global, open source, decentralized supercomputer that anyone can access. Golem consists of user machines ranging from personal laptops to entire data centers. Through the Golem platform, any user can become a provider and user of computing power, whether it is a personal computer or a large data center.
The Ethereum-based trading system is applied to the Golem platform to settle the revenue of computing power providers and the payment fees of computing power users. Users can buy and sell computing power on the network, which means that users can complete tasks that require computing power on other people's computers, or sell their idle computing power to those who need it. Golem is composed of all nodes running Golem applications, running in a completely peer-to-peer manner. It can be used to simulate stock markets, big data analysis, medical research and even cryptocurrency mining, thus reshaping business models such as cloud mining.
Golem automatically matches users' computing power needs with providers, and provides a probabilistic statistical micropayment method based on Ethereum to reward users who share computing power resources. After the user sets the computing power task, Golem will automatically assign the task to the network node. The user can choose the RAM, disk capacity and CPU cores provided. To ensure that there is no damage to the node's computer, the computing power task runs on a virtual machine.
Golem was originally planned to run similar to a DAO, where users could obtain tokens and have voting rights during the ICO phase. However, due to the DAO attack, the Golem team decided to crowdfund through a normal ICO. The Golem Network Token (GNT) was created during the crowdfunding phase and is a core part of the Golem project development, used to ensure flexible control of the project. After the GNT token is generated during the crowdfunding phase, it will become an integral part of the Golem network's many functionalities.
The Golem ecosystem uses an Ethereum-based payment system and Golem tokens (GLEM) to facilitate transactions between users. The ecosystem consists of three main groups: requesters, providers, and software developers. Golem believes that the network will be more price-competitive than traditional cloud computing services, thereby incentivizing users to choose Golem.
Requesters are users who wish to access the shared computing power in the network in exchange for GLEM. They can access the computing power available in the network through Golem applications that run specific tasks. Golem provides a local application where users can run tasks and track various metrics.
Providers are users who contribute their hardware to increase the computing power of the network's supercomputer. Since Golem aggregates computing power across providers, these users can provide hardware ranging from personal PCs to full data centers. Providers can choose the proportion of their contributed hardware to add to the network and the price for using their computing power. Requesters pay Providers using GLEM.
Currently, Golem is creating the necessary developer tools for would-be software developers, including an application registry where developers can publish their applications and requesters can easily search and find the specific applications and tools they need.
As a use case, CGI rendering is a great example of an application for Golem. Instead of using expensive cloud-based services or waiting for local rendering to complete the task, CGI artists can now rent computing resources from other users to render images. This is similar to the model of the rndr cloud rendering project mentioned earlier.
