Millions of computers sit idle for hours each day. Thousands of pedabytes of free space remain untapped in corporate data centers and on hard drives across the world, yet existing systems continue to be replaced with bigger, more powerful hardware. What if our existing computing resources could be better leveraged? What if retired computers could be put to use, instead of being thrown in the landfill? How much energy would be saved? How much waste would be reduced?
GreenByte is the answer. Both a framework for the world's first Global Computing Cloud, and a crowdsourced commodities market where data storage and processing power are traded among corporations and individuals alike, GreenByte will lower the barrier to entry for mass storage and processing services, and increase the per-kilowatt-hour efficiency of the networked world. Elegance, not raw power, will become the future of computing.
The implementation is simple: The GreenByte Cloud, with powerful software and network switching at its core, is used to organically cultivate, grow and manage a massive utility computing grid (the cloud) made up of millions of individual workstations across the globe. Computing resources from this grid – specifically data storage and processing power – are traded as commodities on the GreenByte Exchange.
Individual GreenByte participants will have paid access to distributed computing resources, but can also be compensated for their contributions – all through the Exchange. The non-centralized nature of the network, made up of many distributed nodes managed by the Global Computing Cloud, will leverage idle and unused computer time-share processing and storage, while small devices such as PDAs and phones can act as thin-clients, acquiring processing power and storage for remote virtual computing with capabilities limited only by the power of the cloud itself.
Each node in the cloud will function as an independent client, with network redundancy built-in. The cloud will continue to route and switch even if a significant portion of the nodes were to go offline. In the event of an outage, the clustered node network map model will prevent any one part of the network from restricting flow or access to any other node and its associated data. Leveraging industrial grade security, and bit-torrent file transfer technology, network traffic will be both encrypted and scattered – leaving data safe and secure.
GreenByte will not only make this distributed computing network open and free to the public, but it will also license the technology to enterprise and institutional clients to build their own private Computing Clouds.
As the cloud evolves, it will serve as a middleware virtualization platform. And with the development of higher bandwidth wireless technologies, from WiMax's multi-megabit connections to 3G LTE (Long Term Evolution), ultrawideband promises to make cloud computing as seamless as the desktop experience itself.
Through automated provisioning management that leverages the surplus of available computing resources on our personal and corporate computers, GreenByte will provide an elegant solution to the problem of energy usage and e-waste while paving the way to supercomputing in the palm of your hand.
GreenByte Workgroup Founders: Drew Baldwin, Brady Brim-DeForest
Copyright © 2008 Brady Brim-DeForest and Drew Baldwin. All Rights Reserved.
