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AR surged by 70% in a single day, what is the newly launched parallel computing layer AO?

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Original Title: "AR Single-day Burst Pull 70%, What is the Parallel Computing Layer AO that has been newly launched?"

Original Author: Nan Zhi, Odaily Star Daily

Early this morning, Forward Research, the core organization of the Arweave ecosystem, held an online press conference to officially launch AO, a decentralized parallel computing layer based on the Arweave permanent storage network. Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, provided detailed information about AO during the conference and announced the opening of the test network.

Upon the news release, Arweave's token AR surged from 16 USDT to a peak of 27.5 USDT, with a maximum increase of approximately 72%. In this article, Odaily Planet Daily will interpret the functions, features, and differences of AO.

What is AO?

According to the official documentation, an AO computer is a single, unified computing environment (single system image) hosted on a heterogeneous node set in a distributed network. The AO computer aims to provide an environment that allows for any number of parallel processes to run simultaneously, coordinated through an open messaging layer. The messaging mechanism connects independently running processes together, ultimately forming a "network".

Simply put, the bottom layer of AO computers still uses distributed technology with decentralized scheduling units, computing nodes, information transmission nodes, etc., but is perceived by users as a single operating object.

AO Computer Characteristics

According to the official documentation of AO, AO computers have high compatibility and can achieve effective parallel operation of multiple processes, thereby achieving powerful network performance. Its specific features include:

· Low Limitation: Unlike existing decentralized computing systems, AO does not limit the scale and form of the protocol (such as Ethereum's EIP-170, which limits the maximum size of smart contracts to 24.576 kb), while also ensuring the verifiability of the network itself to achieve minimal trust;

· Compatibility: AO's distributed and modular architecture allows existing smart contracts to be quickly embedded into the network, serving as processes for message reception and transmission;

· Modularity: Allows users to freely choose different virtual machines, sorting models, and message transmission security guarantees. In the end, all messages will be settled in a unified format through Arweave's decentralized data layer. This modular feature creates a unified computing environment that can adapt to different workloads, and each process can run quickly and settle effectively.

The core goal of AO computing is to achieve unlimited, trusted, parallel and unified computing services. It creates a new basic environment for the design of DApps, which has the untrusted characteristics of smart contracts and the advantages of traditional computing environments such as Amazon EC2.

(Odaily Star Daily Note: Amazon EC2 is a service provided by AWS that provides scalable cloud computing services. EC2 instances provide a variety of different computing capabilities and configuration options to meet different workloads and requirements.)

Architecture Analysis

AO computer has 5 components in total. Odaily has simplified their functions and operational logic as follows:

The basic unit of network computing for AO computers is the "process". User interaction behavior sends "messages" to the process, which then runs calculations in a specific virtual machine, scheduler, and memory allocation. The "messenger unit" is responsible for delivering messages, sending information to the "scheduler unit" for processing, and the "computing unit" is responsible for calculating output. Finally, the scheduler unit uploads the data to Arweave.

In addition, AO Computer has launched a decentralized operating system called AOS, which allows developers to start command-line processes that are not limited by location when running, thus achieving seamless user interaction on the network. Ultimately, it forms a unified, global computing platform that breaks scalability limitations and is shared by all participants.

Comparison with Existing Ecosystem

与以太坊的差异

Differences from Ethereum

Ethereum is a decentralized computing network where all users share memory and a single execution thread. The original idea behind Ethereum was to add Turing-complete computation to the blockchain, making it a "world computer". The AO document points out that the throughput of the Ethereum core network has not improved since 2015.

Ethereum does not plan to expand its network beyond single-threaded processing power, but instead has taken the path of Rollup extension. This extension method focuses on supporting additional Rollup networks, of which there are 14 in the Ethereum ecosystem. Each of these 14 Rollups represents a single thread (referred to as a "process" in AO) of computation that can be executed in parallel.

AO has proposed a new architecture that focuses on parallel execution rather than shared memory, supporting any number of independent processes while maintaining program decentralization and trustlessness.

与去中心化计算市场差异

Differences between Decentralized Computing Markets

Traditional smart contract platforms, such as Ethereum, are limited by their shared-thread architecture, which restricts them to only executing small-scale computing tasks. This limitation hinders the scalability and efficiency of applications, and affects the possibility of intensive computing.

Some networks, such as Akash, aim to promote large-scale computing in decentralized environments. They provide a decentralized container hosting service marketplace that allows for the execution of traditional and non-deterministic programs, but sacrifices the ability to create trustless services (i.e. smart contracts).

AO computer uses holographic state mechanism, which can maintain the traditional smart contract execution function. AO does not attempt to reach consensus on the state of the calculation itself, but focuses on ensuring that the interaction log is written and can be used on Arweave. Then the holographic state system ensures that the output is always the same. Simply put, in traditional blockchain, all nodes need to reach consensus and ensure that the data copies of the nodes are consistent through consensus algorithms, while AO first parallel computes and outputs to Arweave, and then ensures consistent output results through holographic state mechanism, thus ensuring computing power and smart contract support capability.

Conclusion

According to the document, AO computers are highly expandable, capable, and compatible parallel world computers. However, its internal test network has only been launched for a month, and it remains to be seen whether it can successfully land on the main network in 2024 and whether its landing performance can meet expectations.