Nebulous calculations for biomedicine
Startup "shot": the Russian team has collected $42 million of investments
The Russian IT startup SONM (Supercomputer Organized by Network Mining), which is developing a worldwide universal supercomputer based on blockchain technology, has collected $ 42 million of investments through an ICO on the Ethereum platform to continue its development. SONM company was founded by developer Sergey Ponomarev and chemist Andrey Voronkov. Now the startup team consists of ten people.
Andrey Voronkov, an employee of the Chemical Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University, has been calculating formulas for new drugs for a long time. As you know, supercomputers are used to search for formulas, which are always loaded with different tasks. Andrey Voronkov came up with the idea to combine the computing resources of different people to select new formulas. This practice has existed for quite a long time, but the innovation proposed by the SONM startup is that it is proposed to pay for calculations with tokens issued by the company (the token in this case is understood as a payment unit, in fact – a cryptocurrency).
Explains Andrey Voronkov, founder of the SONM project, an employee of the Faculty of Chemistry of Lomonosov Moscow State University, a researcher at the Biopharmaceutical Cluster of MIPT:
"In our startup, we promise to provide computing power and the possibility of renting settlement capacity. It is a global operating system for the so-called computer fog (fog computing). Now there is cloud computing, where identical computers count some tasks. And in foggy computing, you can connect not only computers, but anything: a phone, a refrigerator – that is, any "computing" device. We are making an operating system that can be installed on all devices in the world and perform calculation tasks through them."
There have been no such projects in Russia yet. In the future, the proposed technology can become a very powerful distributed system that is capable of solving any tasks, including strategic tasks. The developers of the SONM startup offered a description of the project, and also presented the first prototype – an alpha version where users can host servers. The first users who hosted the game servers have already received payment in tokens. As a result, in two days on the Ethereum platform (cryptocurrency), $ 42 million was collected for this project in terms of cryptocurrency.
"Now the value of cryptocurrencies is created by so–called miners," says Andrey Voronkov. – These are people who have computing power, but, as a rule, they are used for highly specialized tasks. These capacities are specialized in cryptography. There are certain algorithms that encrypt blocks. They do a pretty useless job: they decrypt these blocks and get money for it, which thus gain value. And we suggest instead of decrypting cryptography – in this case, no one needs it, because it's useless work (just burning electricity) – make useful calculations and receive the accrual of tokens."
"We can change the essence of mining. If we change the essence of mining, then our project can come out on top, ahead of bitcoins and Ethereum, because our mining will be loaded with useful calculations," Voronkov notes.
The next task is to place scientific calculations using the new system. Andrey Voronkov dreams of transferring his project "Drug discovery at home" on the calculation of drugs, proteins, the creation of new generation drugs to a new computing platform.
In the long–term plans of startups - to create an element of artificial intelligence, which itself will be able to choose computational tasks and send them to the right computers, analyzing profitability in tokens.
Judging by the public reaction to the developers' proposals, they see the future of digital technologies more accurately than anyone else.
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20.06.2017