🔬Frank Muldoon, computational fluid dynamics and optimization researcher and technical advisor in ANNA Systems talks about the project
"The issue of, acquiring computational resources has always been a key one in fields that carry out large numbers of calculations, as the limiting factor in such fields (computational fluid dynamics and physics, image processing, optimization of engineering systems and so forth), is the speed with which calculations can be carried out. And time, of course, is money. The growth of the internet, in particular the increase in the speed with which data is transferred across it, have resulted in connecting a huge number of computers together, which, at least in theory, has thereby enormously increased the size of the computational resources potentially available to any one person of company. What is missing is a practical way to connect those needing such computational resources with those providing them in manner that is economically profitable for both sides.
▫️A goal of ANNA Systems is to move from theory to practice concerning making computational resources available on an as needed basis to those needing to perform large numbers of calculations, with the computational resources being provided by individuals and companies providing such resources in return for compensation. Clearly for such cooperation between users of computational resources and those providing them to develop and grow, from the very beginning such cooperation must be based on economic realities and market forces. A key point is that users and providers very often will be one and the same person or company. This is due to the nature of numerical work where setting up the problem and running small size trial simulations takes up the majority of an engineer's time. Without taking additional steps, in the course of this "people" time, computational resources are typically idle and thereby represent a significant waste of money. If these idle computational resources could be rented out when not needed, then significant savings may be realized.
▫️Due to the recent explosion of activity concerning crypto-currencies, there presently exists a huge number of powerful video cards connected to the internet for the sole purpose of using the computational resources of the video cards to carry out computations (i.e.mining).ANNA Systems believes that the present situation where enormous amounts of energy (roughly the energy consumption of Switzerland) is consumed by mining in the form of in and of itself useless computations is unsustainable in the long run and will be replaced by a more rational use of the computational resources in the form of preforming computations that in and of themselves have intrinsic value, with intrinsic value being defined by the ability of the computations to solve real problems of interest in areas such as computational fluid dynamics and physics, image processing, optimization of engineering systems and so forth."
