The Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Digital Revolution
It is generally accepted and agreed that the world has embarked on its fourth Industrial Revolution, with a number of experts predicting that this “revolution” will be of such magnitude that it is destined to transform and disrupt our lives forever; it’s called The Digital Revolution.
Data is recognized as the lifeblood and fuel of The Digital Revolution; a commodity which has commentators including The Economist claiming...
“the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”.
Data is the Fuel of the Digital Revolution
Data is the new oil!
A world without Google and Amazon is unthinkable. A life without the interactions and entertainment of Facebook and Fortnite is almost unimaginable.
However, convenience and entertainment have a price to pay and analysts predict that the global demands for data are unsustainable; the world’s population of 7.8 Billion people are hungry to consume more data than computers can physically process at present.
The World is Running out of Data Processing Power
In 2020, it was estimated that 1.145 trillion Mb of data was created every day, every human created approximately 1.7Mb of data per second.
In 2022, 91% of Instagram users engage with brand videos, users send 650 million Tweets per day, 333 billion emails per day are sent, 42 million WhatsApp messages are sent per day, Google handles 6 billion searches per day, and there are 4.95 billion active social media users (62% of the global population). (Source: TechJury)
Even a lesser definition 480p video streamed on YouTube uses 8.3Mb of data per minute, 500Mb per hour. A higher-quality 1080p uses more data! (Source: WhistleOut). One SnapChat uses 1Mb of data. (Source: Canstarblue)
These industries acquire data from multiple sources, aggregate data, consolidate data, validate data, analyze data and distribute data. Data consumption and processing is increasing exponentially as such, the world needs more processing power…
“The world is rapidly running out of the computing processing power needed to tackle advanced problems and power our most sophisticated technology”. - Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.
Centralized versus Decentralised Processing
Centralized Processing
Large data centers deliver large data processing capability for mainstream data. The largest data center in the world is The Citadel, in Nevada, USA, and covers an area of 7.2 Million sq ft.
However, these data centers cannot just grow and expand as data requirements grow:
They impact the local environment and ecology
They are limited on physical footprint
Centralized service provision is a risk for terrorism, fire, and flood
Energy consumption for operation and ventilation puts greater pressure on local energy resources impacting the local communities
They consume significant amounts of fossil fuel to operate
More importantly, centralized data centers are not ideal for new industries and technology applications. Sophisticated new technologies, such as powering blockchain computations, require a different powering solution - a distributed network of global processing power - effectively a global decentralized supercomputer.
Decentralized Processing
A network of distributed, interconnected data processors is the alternative to centralized, large-scale, resource-intensive data centers. Harnessing distributed processing power creates a global supercomputer.
This distributed network can scale up and downsize as demand increases and falls, energy consumption is spread worldwide, impact on fossil fuel usage is reduced and risk of failure of the service is minimized as processing power is not centrally located. Sub-networks can be automatically generated as demand changes. A network of high-power processing devices can be created for a processing-intensive requirement; lower processing-intensive requirements can be delivered by a sub-network of lower-processing power devices.
Harnessing distributed power is key to the data processing requirements of The Digital Revolution.
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