Golem - The Ethereum Powered Supercomputer for Everyone

Odds are pretty good that you've heard about the Golem project over the last year or so since it's ICO completed.

But what is it?

What is the Golem project attempting to do? Read on and find out more about this exciting Ethereum powered project that's gearing up to launch early next year.

A global supercomputer that anyone can use

This is the situation: there are many organizations and individuals that occasionally or intermittently need huge amounts of computing power.

For example, there are people that need to render large amounts of computer graphics data. There are organizations that are involved in machine learning and AI testing.

There are even groups of people that want to rent computing power in order to mine cryptocurrency. In all of these cases, there have only been two solutions up until now.

These include buying massive supercomputers at incredibly high and ever-increasing prices or renting computing power at high rates from centralized providers that run a psuedo monopoly. The Golem Network plans to change all of that using the power of Ethereum.

How it works is computing power providers lend their unused computing power to the Golem Network. The network uses these resources to process request from those who want to rent the services of the network.

Large tasks are automatically split up by the network and sent to hundreds or thousands of computing nodes for processing. The payment for this computational power renting is paid through Golem tokens.

Similar to mining cryptocurrency, those who are providing computer resources are reimbursed for their participation on the network.

Project status and delays

The status of the Golem Network is still somewhat unknown. While the company has been in active communication with the community, they have still refused to provide a concrete release date for when the first main net release of the platform will go live.

Originally, the first main release was supposed to go live a few months ago. That release, called Brass Golem, would have supported CPU based graphics rendering. The release was delayed, however, as the developers felt that it was not yet ready.

During the time between the intended release and today, Golem token value has shifted somewhat, hitting lows of $0.18 and then more recently to highs of around $0.35. The increase in price happened at almost the same time as the overall bump in Ether prices to the $450 range.

The future of the platform

The goal of the project is to eventually offer a highly adaptable API that will allow for almost any common computing use to be run on the network. Software developers will eventually be able to adapt their software to connect to the Golem Network natively.

After the first main net release comes out, and additional use cases go from theory to reality, it is highly likely that demand for the tokens will increase swiftly.

This, in turn, should lead to an overall uptick in prices for the token. That, however, is yet to be seen as we still don't know exactly when the network will eventually go live with its first CPU rendering use case.