User:Jarlove99/sandbox
| Founded | March 28, 2018 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Bob Miles |
| Headquarters | Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. |
| Website | salad |
Salad Technologies is an American technology company based in Salt Lake City that develops an open-source software of the same name. The Salad desktop application permits users to share idle computational resources from personal computers on a distributed computing network. In exchange for their contributions to various high-throughput computing tasks, these participants earn digital rewards (known as "Salad Balance" that can be used to redeem video games, DLC, gift cards, controllers, and other gaming peripherals.[1]
Desktop Application
[edit]
Salad software orchestrates user contributions to accomplish intensive, peer-to-peer processing tasks on a distributed network. A simplified user interface permits its users (predominantly gamers) to voluntarily share latent resources from inactive consumer electronics by pressing the "Start" button whenever they wish to go AFK. Official documentation details optional settings that allow the software to detect when the host computer is idle.[2]
Alpha Release
[edit]The Salad desktop application was launched as an open-source software project in 2018[3]. Code for the alpha build product was signed by Commodo CA and funded by local venture capital firms from Salt Lake City, UT.[4] This early prototype allowed users to share compute cycles from a graphics processing unit to support cryptomining on the Ethereum blockchain via third-party mining pools. Subsequent updates introduced integrated support for other cryptocurrency protocols and computational workloads that require the use of a central processing unit.[5]
Salad Storefront
[edit]The Salad Storefront is the homepage of the Salad desktop application. From this online marketplace, Salad users may browse digital rewards from gaming platforms like Discord and Steam, as well as gift cards from Visa, Amazon, and other ecommerce platforms. All redemptions on the Salad Storefront are made with digital rewards value earned through shared computing activity. On or before September 20, 2021, the Salad Storefront became an authorized vendor of controllers, headphones, and other gaming hardware devices designed by Turtle Beach and its subsidiary ROCCAT manufacturing brand.[6]
Ongoing Development
[edit]Salad Technologies has announced ongoing research into "diversified workloads" for enterprise applications such as "medical research, massive AI experiments, engineering simulations, rendering workloads, and spot jobs from local IoT devices."[7]. Recent staff commentary suggests that developers are investigating ways to leverage containerization technologies and the Microsoft Windows host compute service layer to securely distribute partial compute tasks to "individual nodes on the Salad network" using fully homomorphic encryption.[8]
Computing Network
[edit]In corporate communications, Salad refers to its distributed network as "the Kitchen."[9] Its current throughput is unknown. A Computer Weekly article from April 2021 benchmarked average network data transfer rates at 30 petaFLOPS, with peaks exceeding those of the "world's ninth-fastest supercomputer."[10]
According to the Top500, that distinction would have then belonged to the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, a 448,448-core system capable of reaching peaks of 38.7459 petaFLOPS.[11] Frontera's "petascale computing system" debuted in June 2019 after researchers were awarded a $60M grant by the National Science Foundation.[12]
Community Engagement
[edit]Salad's official community Discord server has accrued over 40,000 subscribers as of November 2021.[13] In August 2021, Salad Technologies sponsored the Salad Cup, a competitive eSports tournament featuring prominent Starcraft II players from South Korea (such as 2016 StarCraft II World Championship Series victor Byun "ByuN" Hyun Woo).[14] Later that year, Salad partnered with the Dallas-based Esposure gaming academy to sponsor events in local gaming communities.[15] The first such event was the 15K Fall Series Championship, a live NBA2K tournament hosted by the Unified Pro-Am Association on October 3, 2021.[16]
Company History
[edit]Salad Technologies was founded in 2017 by current CEO Bob Miles, an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur from New South Wales. Miles produced and appeared in The Green Way Up, a twelve-part television series that aired on the National Geographic television network in 2012 [17]</ref>. The documentary followed Miles and fellow engineers on a 12,000 km journey from Tasmania to Darwin in a vehicle powered by a homemade biodiesel engine. The series later streamed on Netflix in select regions.[citation needed]
After a career developing UAV guidance systems, Miles obtained seed funding from Utah-based investment firms Royal Street Ventures[18] from Carthona Capital[19]
Corporate Mission
[edit]According to the company's mission statement, Salad aspires to create "the easiest, most trusted way to share compute resources."[20] The brand refers to its shared computing network as a "computesharing community"[21] on a mission to "reclaim the web's compute capacity." [22]
In a press release, co-founder Miles explained the startup company was founded in response to growing data demand that outpaces the processing complexity forecasted by Moore's Law.[23].
Decentralized infrastructure is absolutely fundamental to a decentralized internet—without it, the core promise of Web3 is compromised, and the breakthrough of blockchain will fail to deliver on its true potential. Salad believes crypto and the token economics that power these P2P networks have a glaring blind spot that will ultimately lead, once again, to centralization.
— Bob Miles, Lettuce Celebrate: Salad Partners & Salad Chefs
Miles touted distributing computing networks as "Web3 infrastructure" capable of providing elastic computing resources "at a fraction of the cost" of conventional cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure.[24]
References
[edit]- ^ Takahashi, Dean (13 March 2020). "The DeanBeat: How Salad Lets You Earn Rewards From Your Idle Gaming PC". VentureBeat. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
- ^ Davidson, Cameron (29 June 2021). "How to Enable Auto Start in Salad". Salad Support. Salad Technologies. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
- ^ "About Us". Salad.com. Salad Technologies. Retrieved 12 November 2021.
{{cite web}}: Text "Salad" ignored (help) - ^ {<ref>Miles, Bob (23 January 2019). "What Is Your Computer Worth?". Medium publisher=Salad Technologies. Retrieved 12 November 2021.
{{cite web}}: Missing pipe in:|website=(help) - ^ {<ref>"Does CPU Mining Harm My Computer?". Salad Support. Salad Technologies. 23 July 2021. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Cagney, Keith (28 October 2021). "Fresh Loot: Keyboards, Controllers, and More Gaming Gear". Salad.com. Salad Technologies. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Miles, Bob (9 December 2020). Salad.com. Salad Technologies https://salad.com/blog/lettuce-celebrate-salad-partners-and-salad-chefs. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - ^ {<ref>Cagney, Keith (28 October 2021). "SaladCast Episode 13: Kyle Dodson on Containerized Workloads". Salad.com. Salad Technologies. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"Company". Salad.com. Salad Technologies. Retrieved 9 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Donnelly, Caroline (27 April 2021). "Startup targets PC gamers to build decentralised supercomputer". Computer Weekly. TechTarget. Retrieved 9 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Strohmaier, Erich; Dongarra, Jack; Simon, Horst; Meuer, Martin (18 November 2020). "November 2020". Top500. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"A New NSF-Funded Petascale Computing System". Texas Advanced Computing Center. The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 9 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"SaladChefs". Top.gg. Discord Bots. Retrieved 9 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"Salad Cup#1". Liquipedia. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Seeley, David (29 September 2021). "Dallas' Esposure Teams Up with Cryptomining Startup Salad to Help Gamers Earn Rewards By Computesharing". Dallas Innovates. Dallas Next. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"15K Fall Series". Unified Pro-Am Association. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"The Green Way Up - About". National Geographic TV Asia. Retrieved 12 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"Portfolio". Royal Street Ventures. Retrieved 15 November 2021. and Kickstart Seed Fund <ref>{<ref>"Portfolio". Kickstart Seed Fund. Retrieved 15 November 2021. in order to found Salad Technologies. He went on to hire a small engineering team and release the prototype Salad application in March 2018. Salad began its series A round in December 2020 with an additional $3.2M USD investment <ref>{<ref>Takahashi, Dean (9 December 2020). "Salad Technologies raises $3.2 million so you can reap rewards from your PC's idle time". VentureBeat. Retrieved 12 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>"Our Portfolio". Carthona Capital. Retrieved 15 November 2021. and other existing financial backers.The brand acquired the "salad.com" domain from Hidden Valley Ranch for an undisclosed sum in the spring of 2021.<ref>{<ref>Silver, Elliot [@DInvesting] (October 6, 2021). "Looks like the company that owns Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing sold http://Salad.com to @Salad_Chefs earlier this year. They started out on http://Salad.io and made a super upgrade" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
{{cite web}}: no-break space character in|title=at position 133 (help) - ^ {<ref>"Company". Retrieved 12 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Cagney, Keith. "Salad Season 1 Community Recap". Salad.com. Retrieved 12 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Cagney, Keith (15 April 2021). "Gaming the System: The Story of Salad". Retrieved 12 November 2021.
- ^ {<ref>Miles, Bob (9 December 2020). "Lettuce Celebrate: Salad Partners & Salad Chefs". Salad.com. Salad Technologies. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
- ^ Takahashi, Dean (9 December 2020). "Salad Technologies raises $3.2 million so you can reap rewards from your PC's idle time". VentureBeat. Retrieved 12 November 2021.