At The Metaverse Insider, we had the pleasure of revisiting the decentralized, sustainable cloud ecosystem of DeepSquare – interviewing both Charly Mancel and Christophe Lillo, the respective head of projects and delivery, and the head of infrastructure.
Following our previous interview with DeepSquare’s Co-Founder and Blockchain Lead, we were excited to take a closer look at the technology behind this prosperous company and what its high-performance computing (HPC) means for Metaverse application.
The Metaverse will predominantly be an embodiment of today’s social media and entertainment sectors; with all its potential, experiencing the Metaverse will likely be most enjoyable through the likes of gaming. Whether by utilizing immersive technologies like VR and AR or by simply keeping with current gaming norms – DeepSquare’s cloud-enabled HPC will be essential in the evolution of gaming as we know it.
How will DeepSquare power gaming applications?
From the perspective of gaming publishers and related companies alike, there is always the question of how gaming applications will be powered and therefore experienced. With the need for scalable servers to cope with demands like events, companies will not necessarily want their dedicated servers up and running for short periods of time. DeepSquare has a solution to this via its decentralized network of clusters:
“When companies want to scale fast, we can provide bare-metal and low latency performance that they need for the games.”
“Bare-metal performance and virtualized environments can be the same price provided you rent the bare-metal clusters for a sustained period. However, if high performance is required for short periods on demand, the price of these servers drastically increases”.
This is where DeepSquare really shines through with its innovative technology:
“What is nice with DeepSquare, is that you pay for what you use with tokens. Provided that there is availability on the network, you will be able to control your spending and have the performance you need, regardless of network availability. This is where it can be really beneficial for the cloud gaming industry.”
In adding a layer of affordability to a necessary gaming service, DeepSquare has also ensured they maintain its stance on sustainability – which is often sacrificed at the cost of increasing affordability. Being focused on bleeding-edge technology, DeepSquare utilizes immersion cooling tech at their two sites in Switzerland – cooling their servers and simultaneously recycling the excess heat to their buildings and local district:
“The technology allows us to really make use of 100% of all the hardware we have. And in the case of gaming, thanks to render streaming technology, we can even have multiple players sharing the same GPU. So, if you put all that together, we really have an optimized setup in terms of sustainability.”
What does decentralized, cloud HPC mean for the average gamer?
With gaming hitting mainstream media through global competitions like ESports, it is of no surprise that we are ever curious to have a greater understanding of what this revolutionary tech means for the average and pro gamers alike.
For the end user, it appears that this will not affect them; DeepSquare want their decentralized servers to perform as well as the normal servers which currently exist:
“You might have some nice performance improvements, for example, if the clusters are in your city or in your residence, you will have the best performance.”
This is a positive attribute of a decentralized framework; there will be more clusters everywhere, thus providing a greater experience for people within the same clusters. By being near gamers through multiple sites, latency can be reduced, and overall gaming experiences can be increased.
Overall, the high-performance network stack that DeepSquare has will not make a huge difference to the typical gaming experience. The 200 GB/s networking that they have between nodes will mostly benefit real supercomputing applications and allow blazing fast shared storage.
DeepSquare’s technology may not have a ground-breaking impact on the general latency or performance of gaming – however, it has allowed for progress concerning render streaming. DeepSquare’s cloud-enabled HPC means that all processing requirements can be met through their servers – inferring gamers will not personally need the necessary hardware or GPU to run graphically demanding applications.
Render streaming is truly a revolutionary concept for gamers of any capacity – however, as most of us are aware, it has not proven to be a viable alternative to current gaming norms. DeepSquare’s cloud-enabled HPC is sure to change this, making all applications available to anyone with a connection to their servers.
What separates DeepSquare from other cloud computing services?
With many companies like Cudos who are also involved in the cloud computing industry, it is evident that this technology is crucial for the development of the internet as we know it. Therefore, The Metaverse Insider was curious to further understand how DeepSquare stands out from its competition:
“We have a supercomputing approach. Meaning that if you want to train an AI model with 12, 16 GPUs at the same time with almost no overhead with communication between nodes, we can do that. It is our specialty.”
DeepSquare’s HPC approach utilizing the supercomputing stack is what many companies would consider the golden goose; there are many different approaches to cloud computing currently in the industry, mostly orientated around a decentralized framework using virtualization technology – however, many competitors of DeepSquare would not be able to handle heavy supercomputing workloads.
What is DeepSquare most looking forward to in 2023?
With progress being made in leaps and bounds for the DeepSquare team, we were excited to hear what Charly and Christophe are most looking forward to in 2023.
Here is what Charly had to say:
“On my side, I am excited about releasing the product to make it available to the customers. It will come very soon actually – for example, people that want to do offline rendering for games or movies, etc, will be able to leverage our HPC approach, meaning that they will render their movies much faster than what they used to with normal computers.”
“Also, with games, I think in the first part of 2023, expect to have our first game hosting tests starting with Unity, which I think is very exciting. We will add more apps in our customer portal like a Media upscaling page for people to test the platform in a fun way. We will listen to what the community needs for the next apps to integrate. Once the engine is here, businesses can use our infrastructure to build and host their solution on our platform”
By making this accessible and easy to learn for other businesses, it will be an exciting year for DeepSquare. On Christophe’s side, this is what he had to say:
“I would say I am very excited to break free from the HPC-only type of workloads – and we are announcing the stack to make it also work with serverless and Kubernetes workloads. This is really coming this year. So, we will not only be able to just serve the most demanding HPC workloads but also general-purpose types of jobs.”
This is an exciting time in the space of decentralized cloud computing, and arguably an even more exciting time for DeepSquare. They have set their goals across a multitude of different areas within the industry, targeting the most important needs for cloud computing. We are thrilled to see the direction that DeepSquare is heading in and cannot wait to see what is in store for them in 2023.
