Local Compute
10 statements · 2020–2020
Home devices + Helium = edge infrastructure that skips telcos and clouds entirely
"Hashing It Out #70 - Akash Network - Greg Osuri" (Hashing It Out (The Bitcoin Podcast Network))
“Super mini, when it’s connected to a Helium device, provides an inference layer because a lot of these [IoT] devices are super low-powered… So imagine now you’re essentially creating an edge infrastructure that skips the big telcos and the big clouds altogether. So that significantly reduces the cost envelope when it comes to deploying these edge IoT devices.” — Greg Osuri, 00:48:07
Context: Early (Jan 2020) articulation of home hardware doing AI inference at the edge for mesh-network IoT (quote spans into the 00:48:53 block) — years before the “local AI” framing became mainstream.
Home-to-home encrypted services that skip the cloud altogether
"Hashing It Out #70 - Akash Network - Greg Osuri" (Hashing It Out (The Bitcoin Podcast Network))
“If you’re someone that cares about sovereignty and privacy, having super minis at home gives you this opportunity to control your own data… imagine having super minis in your house and my house and we both running matrix on it and we can connect directly in a peer-to-peer manner and have voice over IP, fully secure communications… that skips the cloud altogether.” — Greg Osuri, 00:49:34
Context: The data-sovereignty use case (quote spans into the 00:50:16 block); he calls this “building the next layer of the web, the web 3 for the edge.”
The Supermini pays for itself in year one — ~110% ROI
"Hashing It Out #70 - Akash Network - Greg Osuri" (Hashing It Out (The Bitcoin Podcast Network))
“Super mini is… a home appliance that is essentially a mini supercomputer… in simple terms, it makes you more money [than] you spent purchasing the device in the first year. So the ROI is expected to be somewhere around 110% in the first year… it gives you a mechanism to bring the cloud to your house.” — Greg Osuri, 00:45:56
Context: A quantified home-compute-earns-income prediction (spans into the 00:46:41 block); he compares its power to a classic Cray supercomputer (“as powerful as a Cray 70”) and lists an app-store model with Eth2, Orchid and Sentinel VPN nodes runnable “from the comfort of your couch.”
Home GPU Kubernetes clusters as a milestone of computing's evolution
The Akashian Challenge Phase 1 Livestream (Akash Network)
“If you think about a technical stack underneath the super mini, it is a full-on Kubernetes cluster… running on a GPU stack in your home… it took so long for technology in terms of evolution to even get us to a point that we can have a home cluster running Kubernetes. It’s just a testament of advancement in simplicity and user-friendliness.” — Greg Osuri, 00:57:22
Context: Following Jack Zamplin’s remark that infrastructure is moving from enterprises down to average users in the home — the “compute moves home” mega-trend framing.
Super Mini sold out — 300 units in four weeks
The Akashian Challenge Phase 2 Livestream (Akash Network)
“Super minis are not available any longer for sale. We sold out the first 300 units in about four weeks’ time, so these are in very, very high demand, and the only way to get the Super Mini right now is… to come to the livestream.” — Greg Osuri, 00:36:58
Context: Early demand signal for Akash’s home compute device (later shelved); earlier in the stream Greg calls it “a complementary piece of hardware that connects to the network and earns you tokens when you’re not using the box” ([00:11:33]), and the team encourages people to build their own (“it’s a permissionless world”).
Supermini: a home GPU node that earns tokens when idle
The Akashian Challenge Phase 1 Livestream (Akash Network)
“Super mini is a mini supercomputer… it is a node on the Akash network… validators’ expectation is that the nodes are in a data center, whereas super mini is supposed to be for your home… The cool thing is when you’re not using the super mini, because it’s a node on the network, it earns Akash tokens. So when you want to scale up beyond just using one super mini, you can use those tokens and pay for it.” — Greg Osuri, 00:43:06
Context: Answering “how does the Supermini play into Akash?” — 2020-era articulation of home hardware earning income on a compute marketplace; 300 units sold out in two weeks.
Supermini: a home appliance you plug in to earn tokens
"The Akashian Challenge Livestream: Phase 3 Week 1" (Akash Network)
“We made it so that it is a home appliance and not just a server data center appliance… the idea is to have this plug-in earn mechanism where you just plug it in and just earn Akash tokens without having to do a single thing… it does have a very powerful GPU.” — Greg Osuri, 00:55:35
Context: Supermini described as Akash’s reference architecture for non-technical users — frictionless passive income from home hardware; initial order of 300 units shipping, 400-500 on the waitlist. Early home-compute thesis.
"Plug and earn" — getting cloud into consumers' homes with the Supermini
Greg Osuri - AKASH Network (At Stake)
“I was like, okay, how can we get cloud in the hands of consumers?… If you wanted to build something that is plug and earn, right? Not like the best and most powerful device, but the best in terms of usability.” — Greg Osuri, 00:19:34
Context: Origin story of the Supermini, a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster in consumer packaging, explicitly modeled on Helium’s in-home node — an early articulation of home hardware earning income from compute.
True decentralization requires a device in the home
Greg Osuri - AKASH Network (At Stake)
“To achieve true decentralization, we need a home with the device, right? Like, so we were like, well, how would a generic Kubernetes cluster that you can schedule any workload at home look like?” — Greg Osuri, 00:20:30
Context: Whisper garbles the phrase slightly (“a home with the device” — likely “a device in the home”); the argument is that home-hosted nodes, not data centers, are the end state of decentralization.
Supermini is a home provider device with home-device constraints
The Akashian Challenge Livestream: Phase 3 Week 2 (Akash Network)
“Super mini is a home device, so… the expectation is that you’re not going to have a consistent network capacity, so the kind of workers you can run on super mini have to take into account these limitations of a home device versus a data center based device.” — Greg Osuri, 00:48:01
Context: Answering whether the Supermini (an experimental 300-unit, US-only home server that acts as an Akash provider) can validate other chains; early articulation of home hardware supplying the network.