Faceter and SONM are pleased to announce the start of a technical cooperation. Faceter will run a resource-consuming deep-learning computation for facial recognition on a decentralized SONM infrastructure. Faceter Fog Follow Nov 2, 2017 · 4 min read

Faceter, — an online service and intelligent software for facial recognition and video stream analysis from security surveillance systems and SONM — a platform for decentralized computation, based on cryptocurrency mining approach, begin a collaborative project. Companies will do research and development to run Faceter’s algorithms for facial recognition and video stream analysis on IaaS SONM platform. The result of this cooperation will be a market-ready product for running AI algorithms on “fog computing” infrastructure.

Faceter expects that fog computing (decentralized computing) will help to significantly reduce costs on IT-infrastructure. It is the largest portion of expenses, which are needed to run resource-consuming deep-learning computer vision algorithms.

A rough approximation shows that costs for “fog computing” infrastructure can be several times less costly than cloud-based solutions (AWS, Azure, etc.), even if we would pay cryptocurrencies miners twice for what they can get by mining Etherium.

To illustrate a good example, we made a very rough comparison:

*Research shows that one NVidia GeForce 1080 TI GPU has roughly the same performance as four p2.xlarge instances of AWS for TensorFlow tasks.

Vladimir Tchernitski, the CTO & Co-founder of Faceter, comments: “Decentralized infrastructure provides the possibility of reducing the cost of computation significantly. Thereby, we can provide advanced intelligent software based on complicated deep-learning algorithms to the mass market. And Faceter’s technology for facial recognition and event-based security becomes available even for individuals who own simple home cameras connected to the Internet.

Fog computing gives flexibility and offers the possibility of fast scalability. It is necessary in cases when the demand on Faceter’s SaaS solution suddenly raises. It can happen when a customer starts a marketing campaign and gets a lot of visitors to their shop or restaurant. Or it can be a temperer demand on facial recognition — during a party, concert or sporting event. We, along with the professional SONM team, have already started to build a strategy for developing the proper solution for running Faceter on a fog computing infrastructure. We are going to complete the R&D stage at the end of this year, and then launch the beta-version of the SaaS solution of Faceter for the mass market, which will be run on a decentralized infrastructure. The alfa-version of the product for the mass market will be launched before June, 2018.

Igor Lebedev, the CTO at SONM, comments,“We are developing our super computer exactly for these type of tasks, such as deep-learning algorithms, which are consuming a lot of computing resources. Our technology is about connecting computing resources, which are being used in cryptocurrencies, mining and by customers who need a lot of computing power, as Faceter and other companies running machine-learning software do. This model of cooperation has a lot of potential, because there is a gap between the cost of traditional cloud infrastructure and the profits from crypto mining. Customers can save a significant amount of money, even if they need to run AI software by using the resources of crypto miners. At the moment, SONM is on the stage of developing the MVP-testnet version for test Ethereum network. The launch of the product on the regular Ethereum network will happen in July-August, 2018.”

Vladimir Tchernitski, the CTO at Faceter, comments, “We believe that fog computing can become the most popular model of organizing IT-infrastructure in the future. In the beginning of this year, the CTO of Google, Ray Kurzweil, made a prediction that the Earth will become one big giant computer in 2045. That means that all computing resources will be connected into one network and will be used as a holistic computing complex. I think that fog computing can become one of the technologies which will make this possible.”

Some information about SONM

This is a decentralized global supercomputer, based on a cryptocurrency mining scheme. SONM is oriented to two types of users: owners of high-powered hardware for mining and customers who need to run computing power-consuming software and use cloud infrastructure for it. SONM offers such customers a similar stack of IaaS and PaaS solutions. Cryptocurrencies miners can provide their hardware through SONM and gain additional profits.

Despite the fact that SONM’s interface is user-friendly and may look like the interface of traditional cloud infrastructure providers, SONM is based on very different principles. It is a decentralized solution, SONM’s computing nodes are spread worldwide, it has scalability on a global level, it can be paid for by cryptocurrencies, pricing is based on demand and is controlled by the market. The beta-version of the system will be launched before January, 2017; the alfa-version before August, 2018.