Salad Technologies is soliciting the help of PC gamers around the world to lend their idle rigs to help build the world’s largest supercomputer, and earn digital rewards in return.
Since Salad’s launch in 2018, it has enrolled over 250,000 gamers, referred to as chefs, and leveraged the idle processing power of their desktop computers to validate blockchain transactions via its open source desktop app.
Now Salad is extending that concept and launching a marketplace that will lend the combined processing power of its chefs to advanced computation-intensive tasks such as medical research, AI development and engineering.
With average network performance steady at more than 30 petaFLOPS, Salad claims the computational power of its network has already edged past the world’s ninth-fastest supercomputer.
“The consumer hardware market is massive. When we started Salad, there were around 400 million gaming rigs in the world, and most of them gathered dust for 22 hours a day. If you want to activate that kind of supply, you’ve got to show everyone how to make the most of their PC,” said Salad CEO Bob Miles.
Digital rewards
Distributed computing projects, such as Folding@Home, have been in existence for some time now, but they don’t reward their users in the same fashion as Salad.
In return for lending their idle gaming rigs, Salad users earn rewards value that they can redeem for games, gift cards, and subscriptions.
The company shares that in the last three months alone, its chefs have collectively generated $500,000 in rewards value and redeemed over 40,000 unique rewards in the process.
“This past year has really shown us what our Chefs can do, and we’re stoked to see them get a crack at these diversified workloads and even bigger earnings down the road,” says Miles.
The company is also working to build a payment gateway known as SaladPay, which will enable users to make purchases across the web using the value they’ve earned sharing their idle resources.
