AR单日爆拉70%，新上线的并行计算层AO是什么？
Original | Odaily
Author | Nan Zhi
Early this morning, Forward Research, the core institution of the Arweave ecosystem, held an online launch event to officially introduce the decentralized parallel computing layer, AO, based on the Arweave permanent storage network. Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, provided a detailed introduction to AO and announced the opening of the testnet.
Upon the news, the Arweave token AR surged from 16 USDT to a peak of 27.5 USDT, with a maximum increase of approximately 72%. Odaily will interpret the functions, features, and differences of AO in this article.
What is AO?
According to the official documentation, AO is a single, unified computing environment (Single System Image) hosted on a heterogeneous set of nodes in a distributed network. AO aims to provide an environment that allows for the simultaneous operation of arbitrary numbers of parallel processes through an open messaging layer. The message passing mechanism connects independently running processes together, eventually forming a "network".
In simple terms, the underlying layer of AO still utilizes distributed technology, with decentralized scheduling units, computing nodes, and information transfer nodes, but it presents itself as a singular entity from the user's perspective.
Features of AO
The official documentation of AO states that AO has high compatibility, enables effective parallel operation of multiple processes, resulting in powerful network performance. Its specific features include:
Low restrictions: Unlike existing decentralized computing systems, AO does not impose limitations on the scale and form of protocols (such as Ethereum's EIP-170, which limits the maximum size of smart contracts to 24.576 kb), while 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, acting as processes for message reception and transmission;
Modularity: Allows users to freely choose different virtual machines, sorting models, and message transmission security guarantees. Eventually, all messages will be settled through the decentralized data layer of Arweave in a unified format. This modular feature creates a unified computing environment that can adapt to different workloads, and each process can run quickly and settle efficiently.
The core goal of AO computers is to achieve unrestricted, trusted, parallel, and unified computing services. It creates a new foundational environment for the design of DApps, combining the trustless nature of smart contracts with the advantages of traditional computing environments such as Amazon EC2 and others.
(Odaily note: Amazon EC2 is a service provided by AWS that offers scalable cloud computing services. EC2 instances provide various computing capabilities and configuration options to meet different workloads and requirements.)
Architectural Analysis
AO computers have 5 components, simplified by Odaily in terms of functionality and operating logic:
The basic unit of network computing in AO computers is a "process." User interaction behaviors will send "messages" to processes, which will then run computations under specific virtual machines, schedulers, and memory allocations. The "messenger unit" is responsible for delivering messages, sending information requests to the "scheduler unit" for processing, and the "computing unit" is responsible for calculating outputs. Finally, the scheduler unit uploads the data to Arweave.
In addition, AO computers introduce a decentralized operating system called AOS, which allows developers to launch command-line processes that run without location restrictions, achieving seamless user interaction across the network. This ultimately forms a unified global computing platform, overcoming scalability limitations and being jointly used by all participants.
Comparison with Existing Ecosystems
Differences from Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized computing network in which all users share memory and a single execution thread. The original vision of Ethereum was to add Turing-complete computing to the blockchain, making Ethereum 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 extend the network beyond single-thread processing capacity but has chosen the path of Rollup extension. This extension method focuses on supporting additional Rollup networks, and there are 14 Rollups in the Ethereum ecosystem, each representing the computation of a single thread (referred to as "processes" in AO) and can be executed in parallel.
AO has proposed a new architecture that focuses on parallel execution instead of shared memory, supporting any number of independent processes, while maintaining program decentralization and trustlessness.
Differences from Decentralized Computing Market
In traditional smart contract platforms like Ethereum, the architecture of shared threads limits the execution of only small-scale computing tasks, restricting the scalability and efficiency of applications and affecting the possibility of intensive computing.
Some networks aim to promote large-scale computing in a decentralized environment, such as Akash, which offers a decentralized container hosting service marketplace, allowing the execution of traditional and non-deterministic programs, but sacrificing the ability to create trustless services (i.e., smart contracts).
AO computers use a holographic state machine mechanism that can maintain the traditional smart contract execution functionality. AO does not attempt to achieve consensus on the state of computation itself, but focuses on ensuring that interaction logs are written and can be used on Arweave. Then, the holographic state system ensures consistent outputs. In simple terms, while traditional blockchain requires consensus among all nodes to ensure consistency of data copies through consensus algorithms, AO performs parallel computation and outputs to Arweave first, and then guarantees consistent output results through holographic state mechanism, thereby ensuring computational capability and smart contract support.
Conclusion
According to the document, AO computers are a highly scalable, performant, and compatible parallel world computer. However, its internal testnet has only been launched for a month, and whether it can successfully achieve mainnet deployment in 2024 and whether the deployment performance can meet expectations remain to be observed.
