Torpedo

Torpedo is based on a paper by UC Berkeley that came out a few months ago, called “Sky above the clouds”. It makes a call to practitioners to build an intercloud broker that will help engender a new future for cloud computing, which they call Sky Computing. Web2 cloud computing has allowed remote access to hardware with nothing more than a credit card. However, the incumbents in the space, AWS, Azure and Google, do not offer the lowest possible prices they could, nor do they provide a two sided marketplace for compute buyers and sellers.

To retain customers, compute-providers have not invested time in cloud-interoperability standards. The cloud market is primarily controlled by a few large players because there isn’t a robust market to speculate on the true price of compute. Furthermore, compute-providers require bank account details and user identification information.

Torpedo gives users anonymous access to existing cloud resources. We help you optimize for the most efficient and cost effective choice among available service providers, without having to deal with creating accounts, KYC and subscribing to payment plans with any of them.

We recognise that current players in the centralized compute industry have a strong moat. Torpedo is not yet another “decentralized compute” solution. It is a middleware between the users and cloud providers, that will allow users to access compute power per their specifications instantaneously and at custom granularity, with total anonymity.

We have studied projects trying to fix the ”multi-cloud” problem as well as attempts at creating a decentralized-cloud . Akash, Gridcoin, SONM, Golem, Cartesi, Dfinity, Kompute, and many others have tried to create their own compute resources, yet nobody uses them – the behemoths in the cloud computing make standalone projects irrelevant. Our design goals are as follows:

1. Avoid the dependency on a single cloud provider, instead route the user to the optimal service.
2. Eliminate need for regulations and KYC in order to obtain compute power
3. Make compute a liquid and fungible tradable commodity

The use cases for Torpedo are vast. In a few clicks, we spin up a virtual machine that you can use to run stable diffusion on a preconfigured jupyter notebook, or do data analysis, or host your dApp. No need for signing up with cloud providers, or credit card and KYC details. With multiple cloud providers integrated into Torpedo, you will get the experience of Google Collab at a fraction of the price.

Here’s an example of how the product works: Let's say that someone wants to train an AI model. They open Torpedo, and make a request for using a GPU enabled virtual machine for say 3 hours. Torpedo’s many listening provider nodes use Midpoint price oracles to obtain the market price of this service across different providers. We currently look through quotes offered by Google, Vast.ai and AWS. The minimum over all providers is the least amount the nodes have to charge to break even. Nodes can charge a premium for low latency or reliability. If the user doesn’t have specific services or nodes in mind, a quick round of bidding among nodes takes place to settle on a spot price, and the best node is assigned the job. Now this node uses a Chainlink price oracle to convert the USD to Eth, and relays the price to the user.

Our smart contract suite is deployed using Quicknode RPC endpoints on the Goerli Ethereum Testnet. TorpedoFactory is the master contract. It contains a registry of all valid provider nodes, and a registry of integrated cloud providers. Upon an approved client request, TorpedoFactory creates a TorpedoSession, keyed to only the service provider and user. A Torpedo provider node is registered with various cloud providers. The Torpedo node is paid in Eth by the user for using these services. Thus the user never reveals their identity, but gets access to the most optimal cloud services.

Once the user clicks ok, the node spins up a virtual machine using its most optimal service choice. Using XMTP, credentials to this VM are securely passed to the user. End to end encryption ensures that only the user can read this message, and the speed of XMTP gives our application low latency. The User can then integrate persistent storage from Filecoin/IPFS into their VM instance.