Arweave releases super-parallel computer AO. A quick look at what AO is

Written by: 0xjs@金财经

Two weeks after announcing the launch of the super-parallel computer AO, in the early morning of February 28, 2024, Beijing time, the decentralized storage project Arweave officially launched the AO public test network.  

From the announcement to the official launch, the price of Arweave token AR has more than doubled.

According to the Arweave team , Arweave had this idea as early as early 2020, that the Arweave data storage platform can support a highly scalable blockchain network. When formulating plans to use tokens to represent content ownership in 2023, I realized that a highly scalable network was needed to support the market for such tokens, and then began to develop silently.

Arweave founder Wiliams said that AO has built a hyper-parallel computer that can run any number of threads in parallel at the same time, with incredible scalability.

In other words, Arweave, which was originally engaged in decentralized storage, has entered the computing and smart contract markets. Although its structure and methods are very different from public chains such as Ethereum, it has actually entered the public chain market and competes with them.

Arweave founder Williams said that AO is confident to compete with Ethereum. So, what exactly is AO? What features gave its founders the confidence to compete with Ethereum?

What is AO?

According to AO official documentation, the AO computer is an actor-oriented machine that emerges from a network of nodes that comply with its core data protocol and runs on the Arweave network. Below is a brief introduction to the protocol, its functionality, and technical details.

AO computer is a single, unified computing environment ( Single System Image, a single system image, which is a distributed A model of computing that uses a common interface to multiple networks, a distributed database, or multiple servers but appears to the user as one system), hosted on a set of heterogeneous nodes in a distributed network. AO is designed to provide an environment in which any number of parallel processes can reside and be coordinated through an open messaging layer. This messaging standard connects the independent operational processes of machines into a "network," much like a website runs on independent servers but is connected by hyperlinks into a cohesive, unified experience.

Unlike existing decentralized computing systems, AO is able to support computational operations without protocol-enforced limits on size and form, while also maintaining the verifiability of the network itself (thereby minimizing trust). Additionally, ao’s distributed and modular architecture allows existing smart contract platforms to easily “plug into” the network, acting as a single process that can send and receive messages from any other process.

AO, rather than enforcing a set of choices for all users of a computing environment, is built in a modular form. AO allows users to choose the virtual machine that works best for them, decentralized ordering trade-offs, messaging security guarantees, and payment options. This modular environment is then unified by final settlement of all messages (each sharing the same format) onto Arweave’s decentralized data layer. This modularity creates a unified computing environment suitable for an extremely broad range of workloads, where every process can easily transmit messages and collaborate.

The core goal of AO is to enable trustless and collaborative computing services without any practical scale limitations. This opens up a new design space for applications that was previously impossible, blending the best of smart contract applications (services that don’t need to trust anything but their code) and traditional computing environments (Amazon EC2, etc.).

Due to its scalability, the natural way for developers to use AO is to spawn their own command line ( aos) process within the network and start issuing commands. This developer experience is similar to a developer creating a new server instance on a cloud host and connecting to it via SSH, except this command line process has the properties of a smart contract. Their command-line process ao does not exist in any specific data center or any one physical location, and its computing is completely trustless. Each user can send messages and interact with all other processes and programs. The result is a global "single system image": a unified computer - distributed around the world, running at any scale - shared among all users.

From an end user or developer perspective, AO is essentially simple: AO is a shared computer that they can Run any number of processes in it. These processes are not hosted on any particular server and are not controlled by any individual or group. Instead, once launched, these processes can be cryptographically delegated, providing services permanently in a provably neutral manner. This allows them to guarantee users' rights over time.

AO core functions

Compared with existing decentralized and distributed computing systems, the AO protocol has the following characteristics:

< p>Run any number of processes ("contracts") in parallel: In AO, applications are built from any number of communicating processes. Inspired by the original Actor model (Carl Hewitt, 1973) and Erlang, ao does not allow memory to be shared between processes, but allows them to be coordinated through native messaging standards. Each of these processes can then run at the full speed of available computing resources without interfering with each other. By focusing on message passing, AO can implement a scaling mechanism that is more similar to traditional Web2/distributed system environments than traditional smart contracts.

Unlimited resource utilization in the process: Built on the latency evaluation architecture of SmartWeave and the original version of LazyLedger (later renamed Celestia), nodes in the AO network do not need to execute at all Any computation can lead to a consensus transition on the program state. Status is "holographically" implied by Arweave-hosted process message logs. Computational costs are then delegated to users, who can compute their own states or request execution by a node of their choice.

Access native unlimited hard disk Arweave: The AO process can seamlessly load data of any size directly into memory, execute it and write it back to the network. This setup eliminates typical resource constraints and enables fully parallel execution, greatly expanding application development possibilities beyond the limitations of traditional smart contract platforms. Therefore, it opens the door to complex applications that require large amounts of data processing and computing resources, such as machine learning tasks and highly computationally autonomous agents.

Automatically activate contracts:In traditional smart contract environments (such as Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, etc.), contracts "wake up" to perform calculations based on requests from user transactions. This creates an environment in which the program is not "live" unless the user interacts with it, narrowing the scope of applications that can be built on top of it. ao removes this limitation by allowing contracts to have scheduled "cron" interactions that automatically wake them up and perform calculations at set intervals. Any user, or indeed the process itself, can pay a node to "subscribe" to the process so that computational evaluations are triggered at appropriate frequencies.

Modular architecture that supports extensions: ao's core architecture is an open data protocol whose implementation can be built by anyone. Everything—from sequencers, messaging relays, and even the system’s virtual machines—can be swapped and expanded at will. This flexibility will allow existing smart contract systems in the Arweave ecosystem (Warp, Ever, Mem, etc.) to plug into the ao unified network and be able to send and receive messages from the unified network. This will also allow all of these smart contract systems to share some of the same infrastructure and tools, providing a more coherent computing experience on Arweave.

AO basic architecture

Processes (Processes): The computing unit of the network. A process is represented by a log of interaction messages and initialization data items stored on Arweave . A process defines its required computing environment (its virtual machine, scheduler, memory requirements, and necessary extensions) when it is initialized. While processes are represented at the consensus level in this way, they also imply states that can be computed and selected to execute the process by computing units that meet the requirements. In addition to receiving messages from user wallets, processes also forward messages from other processes through the message unit. Process developers are free to choose how to determine the trustworthiness of these messages.

Messages (Messages): Every interaction with a process is represented by a message. The core of the message is a data item that conforms to the ANS-104 standard. Users and processes (through their outbox and message unit) can send messages to other processes on the network through the dispatcher unit. The semantics of AO messages are somewhere between UDP and TCP packets: delivery is guaranteed only once, but if the message is never forwarded by the message unit - or the recipient never actually processes it - then its delivery will not occur.

Scheduler Units (Scheduler Units, SU): Responsible for assigning slot numbers to information sent to processes and ensuring that data is uploaded to Arweave. The scheduler unit is responsible for assigning a single atomically increasing slot number to messages sent to a process. Once allocated, the scheduler needs to ensure that the data is uploaded to Arweave so that it is permanently accessible to others. Processes are free to choose their preferred orderer, which can be achieved in a variety of ways: decentralized, centralized or even user-hosted.

Computing Units (Compute Units, CU): Computing units are nodes that users and message units can use to calculate the process status in AO. While SUs are obligated to sequence messages for processes they have accepted, CUs are not required to compute the status of a process. This creates a peer-to-peer computing marketplace where CUs offer services that resolve process status and compete with each other—weighing price, the process’s computing requirements, and other parameters. Once the state calculation is complete, CU will return to the caller a signed proof of the output of the specific message parsing (logs, outboxes, and requests that spawned other processes). CUs can also generate and publish proofs of signed status that other nodes can load - optionally for a UDL specified fee.

Communication Unit (Messenger Units, MU): A method of delivering messages in the AO network based on the cranking process Nodes,pass messages to computing units and coordinate to compute,output results. Essentially, when MUs send a message in the system, they send it to the appropriate SU for processing, which then coordinates with the CU to compute the output of the interaction, then recursively repeats the process for any resulting outbox messages. This process continues until there are no more messages to process.

Conclusion

The launch of AO means that Arweave has transformed from a storage platform to a computing platform. Although the architecture and methods adopted by AO are completely different from traditional blockchains, AO is already in a competitive position with many smart contract public chains such as Ethereum.  

AO claims to be extremely scalable, which makes people undoubtedly think that it is another "Ethereum killer".

What changes can AO bring to the encryption market in the future?

AO is still in the test network stage, and all subsequent developments remain to be seen.