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Ask Me Anything with Maja Kehic from the DeepSquare Team

Robyn Abrahams

News Writer

Dec 21, 2022 at 08:33

The future of sustainable High-Performance Computing is at our doorstep, and the DeepSquare team is here to lead us into the future. This insightful conversation is with Maja, the marketing genius behind DeepSquare. In this AMA, Maja broke down the underlying infrastructure DeepSquare uses to provide fast and sustainable rendering and hosting services on its innovative computing power network.

DeepSquare is a decentralized cloud computing company that created the world’s first community-owned association to build high-performance computing hardware infrastructure. The Square team is devoted to providing sustainable high-computation power to their community, locally and across their international Web3 ecosystem. Their goal is to provide the fastest and most efficient computation power while reducing their impact on the environment as far as possible.

This article is based on the conversation with Maja Kehic, head of Marketing at DeepSquare.

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Q: Who are you, and what is your role in DeepSquare?

A: My name is Maya, and I’m head of marketing here at DeepSquare. I’m one of the team members from day one, including drafting and writing the white paper. I was part of that team, and I’m super happy to talk about our baby.

Q: What does DeepSquare do? 

A: It’s a slightly complex project. In a nutshell, what DeepSquare is doing is creating a well-being, decentralized, sustainable cloud computing ecosystem focused on high-performance computing. The way we’re doing it is we are developing high-performance computing clusters on top of DAO networks. We open-sourced our cluster management solution earlier this year.

On top of that, we are developing this set of project walls to deliver decentralization, governance, and transparency. We are building a platform service on which developers and innovators will develop their projects. Their sub-source, software service solutions, and use cases are derived from artificial intelligence to rendering, local rendering, streaming, and prototyping. So basically, whatever needs much computing for a place to go.

Q: What is the difference between local rendering and render streaming?

A: That’s a good question. Basically, local rendering is currently linked to gaming. You download the game, and the rendering happens on your local device. So that’s why you have gaming PCs and phones because the hardware needed to render games is stronger than that which does not. On the other hand, render streaming, which is also, I would call it, still emerging technology, is basically a situation where you have rendering being done on the server side and then being consumed as a stream.

When we’re talking about rendering, local rendering is a situation where the rendering is done on your device. So that’s why we have gaming PCs and phones; this is because of the hardware to be there for rendering. On the other hand, render streaming is a situation where rendering is done on the server side, and then you consume and consume the game through streaming. So, you can still get the same immersive experience regardless of your device.

Q: DeepSquare offers business-to-business (B2B) services. Can independent developers join your server?

A: Yes. You are right. What we are doing is business-to-business. We are building a platform where other builders can build them and host their social. We’ve tested Unity for streaming, but we will test other applications such as Pixel and Unreal Engine.

Which other major industries do you see that you’re attracting the most?

A: We’ll be focusing more on sustainability. We focus on serving because high-performance computing has a huge palette of use cases.

For us to be efficient, we are not addressing all of them simultaneously. At this moment, we are focused on artificial intelligence, training and deployment of AI models, and rendering and renders training. These are the workloads, our partnerships, and clients from these use cases.

But later on, we’ll also do general computing. It also offers opportunities for different applications serving other Oracle-like scientific computing, the internet of things, prototyping, modelling, and whatever needs a lot of computing power.

How do you feel about what’s happening in AI right now?

A: This is super exciting. First of all, I’m in love with AI. Second, because of the project that we are working on, the most exciting thing to me, especially Chat GPT 3. AI is somehow becoming more mainstream. When they talk about AI, I would love to see people move away from thinking about robots that come here to take over our lives and work because AI’s use cases and possibilities can make our lives easier.

I’m incredibly excited. The entire idea of technology is that it’s fast, ever-changing, and evolving—our understanding of how AI is changing. When most people think of AI, they think of cyberpunk or dystopian worlds. We are like the AI takes all the jobs. As we see new tools roll out, it’s more complimentary. It’s something that you can use to expand your toolsets. How do you think people are going to be using it [in] many different ways?

Yeah. So, first of all, AI is something other than something that’s coming. AI is already here. We are using AI daily. I don’t know how you unlock your phone, but I unlock it with my fingerprint. There was some AI involved in developing this small feature of my phone.

I will be happy if a robot comes into my home and does all the cleaning, so I don’t mind. But in general, AI will help us in many different ways, starting from science, education, healthcare, and many other applications. So how I see the future is AI being part of daily life. And also, I do encourage everyone to go and check the GPT chat and DALL-E and all the things you can play with.

How does DeepSquare make High-Performance Computing more sustainable?

A: I’m super happy to talk about this because sustainability is deeply rooted in everything we do. I’ve explained our grid, and the hardware park is owned and operated by Team DeepSquare Association. We get through partnerships with tier 2 and tier 3 cloud providers, research centers and universities, and anyone that can provide professional-level high-performance computing to return to the actual hardware we are using.

When someone tells you [about] a data center, the first thing that pops into your mind is this huge data-centered building, like a massive fridge for servers. This is not what we are doing. We are doing this on a smaller scale but with very powerful supercomputers.

We power them with renewable energy, but more is needed. So sustainability is a more complex issue than energy or power usage. So, we are doing it using an immersion cooling system; this is a practice of dipping your hardware into non-conductive liquid.

That later on also enables us to capture all the heat because supercomputers are highly efficient in computation and are efficient in transforming electricity into heat. And we are now able to capture the heat and reuse it. So two of the clusters we have up and running in Switzerland are connected to the district heating network.

As an AI engineer, you are working on our platform and developing a new vaccine using AI. Someone in Switzerland has a hot shower without any additional coil or whatever is burned. So, instead of wasting it, we are reusing it. To put things into context, there is this thing called the theory, a power usage effectiveness indicator used in data centers.

It tells you, basically, from 100% of the energy you take from the grid. How much do you [use] percentage-wise? How much do you use for your core? Operation? In our case, there will be computing.

In most cases, we are talking about air cooling systems. So because we don’t have any air cooling. Currently, the industry average is 1.50. So 1.6 means that 60% of the energy taken from the grid is used for computing, and 40% is used for side activities. As I said, in most cases, we’re talking about air cooling systems. In our case, few are lower than 1. We don’t have fans because we are using immersion cooling. So we do not have additional intake from the grid for air conditioning. But also, as I said, we are reusing the heat, so our PE is lower than one. And that’s amazing.

Q: How do companies follow your lead to become more sustainable without physically belonging to your grid?

A: This is part of the decentralization story. As mentioned, part of the compute resources is being done through our grid, in part, through partnerships.

So we accept and integrate tier two, three, and cloud providers. The micro clusters we develop are like a blueprint if we are not talking about individuals but smaller players. So, anyone who wants to set up [a] data center, we are more than happy to help them set it up and then join our grid to capitalize on.

Q: What motivates businesses to join your grid?

A: When you join DeepSquare, you’re joining a bigger pool of potential customers and increasing your capacities with more access to high-performance computation capability. So, for example, we are talking about a small local data center that gets an unexpected request from a huge company, and you can’t serve them with your resources. Still, through our network, you can sell all your resources, and additional resources will be supplied through other partners. Everyone, including the entire ecosystem, will benefit, including you as an employer.

Looking at the cloud computing industry now, it’s highly centralized. Five players and five giants are controlling the entire cloud industry. They don’t have any interest in being fair and transparent with pricing. They own the industry. And the whole industry is multiple, single, and very centralized entities, and in their nature, are not to work with others and share their resources. It’s like a pure competition between them. We’re coming up with a different approach and saying they want to aggregate our computer sources, focus on entities, and provide what they need.

Because, after all, cloud computing is a tool for companies to develop. There are groundbreaking solutions, and it should be something other than the source of their frustration which is the case now.

Q: People don’t trust cryptocurrency. How can we get people to see that it can help them? 

A: The conversations we are having with local and smaller cloud providers is very positive. It’s pretty new to everyone. I believe that much education still needs to be done around the entire blockchain and everything. I still have a favorable opinion.

Q: What utility do the DeepSquare tokens have?

A: DeepSquare is in a private sales stage at this moment. And what you, as a potential investor, are getting now is a DeepSquare token (DPS). It’s an asset token. You become part of the DeepSquare community because DeepSquare is an association. The long-term vision of the project is for it to become community-led.

We already had some practice, like voting. So, the DPS token gets you voting and staking rights, and as I’ve said, being a community member. On the other hand, we have a utility token that allows for stalking on the blockchain ecosystem for transaction fees. There are also staking rewards in place later. We haven’t had any votes yet. I believe we’ve had two voting events, with over 50% of holders getting involved.

It’s always positive. It’s quite a complex technical project, so people always understand their full potential. They don’t understand that decentralized cloud computing is needed in this entire Web3 and blockchain story. I’m optimistic about this whole industry.

Q: Where do you hope this company will be in the next 3 years?

A: I can’t tell you in detail because things are changing daily, in three years we expect to have what we don’t expect. We are working to have a more mature ecosystem where you will find many players, like from grid partners. We will include as many as possible local computer providers, but also extend our grid.

Plus, as you said, it’s an exciting environment. We are looking to host all the innovators and all the startups because startups are basically at the forefront of technological development with the face. So, we are looking to host all of them and help them build their groundbreaking solutions. We’re looking to develop a mature, healthy, and functional community-led ecosystem in three years.

Q: What projects are you seeing around you now that you are excited about in the Web3 space?

A: So many! I see more and more projects from Web3. We are using artificial intelligence for their solutions. An example of this is for trading or high-frequency trading as well as rendering, especially now in the metaverse, like using even AI for smart NFTs or for metaverse to make it as immersive as possible.

So, everything is exciting! We, as a project, have clients coming from Web2 companies using AI to develop their applications or AI applications. So, training completely new models. Our onboarding process now is very personal. Later, it will be more self-service. So, any company can go to the website and portal and start working. But now we’re very hands-on. We want to learn as much as we can about what they expect to define and build a better user experience for them.

Q: What can we expect from the crypto market in the new year?

A: Everyone here understands that most of the issues we are facing now are due to centralization because, I don’t know, FTX and everything; it’s coming from a very centralized approach. This is a natural cycle, so it’s the entire crypto. The blockchain industry still needs events and things like this to clear the market.

Players that are not playing for the benefit of the industry. So, crypto will recover in a matter of time. And then again, one more thing to know is that the blockchain industry itself is not dependent on crypto, as crypto is dependent on blockchain. So we see daily many use cases in many projects that use blockchain in all ways.

Q: What do you think about central banks adopting crypto coins?

A: I’m not a crypto analyst, so I’m not going to speculate on this. What makes me happy is that central banks are, instead of ignoring crypto as they used [to] for ages, they’ve moved, which is a sign that they are accepting that the crypto blockchain industry is here to stay. So they’re just trying to find a way to get involved. To me it’s positive. As many people as we have in the industry, the bigger, the stronger the industry will be. So it’s up to us to look at the true nature of centralization.

When it comes to big institutions, if you want to build a Web3 structure the same way you make one in Web2, that is impossible. Very often, she is like, if FinTech is going to kill banks or something, it’s up to banks. If they accept that technology is changing and they need to adapt, we will live in a beautiful world where everyone cooperates and collaborates.

But if banks decide to ignore the development of technology and the development of society. It’s their own mistake. So, it’s pretty universal. It’s up to you how you’re going [to] and to us as individuals to research before we advocate anything.

Q: What is the first thing they need to understand before they get into really participating in the industry?

A: There are a lot of good resources out there. We are living in an exciting period. In a time where so much information is available to everyone, it’s just about you getting more profound as a receiver of the knowledge. We need to dig and find quality things and just hyping or something, so you can start reading about, I don’t know.

Even if you want to learn about AI, there are websites where you can get involved and learn things hands-on. So, it would be best to start reading, get familiar with it, and join communities. People are so open to connecting and sharing knowledge to explain. There are cameras; it’s up to you. You know, you need to do your research before doing anything.

Final words

The DeepSquare team encourages everyone who wants to learn more about the project to find a way to get involved and reach out to them. If you have any questions about high-performance computing, it’s in their domain; check their community.  Telegram, Instagram, Twitter. Team Square is here to answer any questions about the DeepSquare project. But in general, you need to learn, share knowledge, connect with people, and stay decentralized and sustainable.

This article is meant to educate you about the potential that the DeepSquare decentralized cloud ecosystem must provide sustainable high-performance computing services through their grids. This is an intriguing project with numerous use cases applicable across many exciting and valuable industries today. The purpose of this article is not to persuade you to invest in the DeepSquare ecosystem. Still, it should pique your interest enough to explore other high-performance computing and how this explosive technology can touch the industries that most matter to you.

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