User:Jarlove99/sandbox

Salad Technologies is an American technology company based in Salt Lake City that develops an open-source software of the same name. The Salad desktop application permits users to share idle computational resources from personal computers on a distributed computing network. In exchange for their contributions to various high-throughput computing tasks, these participants earn digital rewards (known as "Salad Balance" that can be used to redeem video games, DLC, gift cards, controllers, and other gaming peripherals.

Desktop Application
Salad software orchestrates user contributions to accomplish intensive, peer-to-peer processing tasks on a distributed network. A simplified user interface permits its users (predominantly gamers) to voluntarily share latent resources from inactive consumer electronics by pressing the "Start" button whenever they wish to go AFK. Official documentation details optional settings that allow the software to detect when the host computer is idle.

Alpha Release
The Salad desktop application was launched as an open-source software project in 2018. Code for the alpha build product was signed by Commodo CA and funded by local venture capital firms from Salt Lake City, UT. This early prototype allowed users to share compute cycles from a graphics processing unit to support cryptomining on the Ethereum blockchain via third-party mining pools. Subsequent updates introduced integrated support for other cryptocurrency protocols and computational workloads that require the use of a central processing unit.

Salad Storefront
The Salad Storefront is the homepage of the Salad desktop application. From this online marketplace, Salad users may browse digital rewards from gaming platforms like Discord and Steam, as well as gift cards from Visa, Amazon, and other ecommerce platforms. All redemptions on the Salad Storefront are made with digital rewards value earned through shared computing activity. On or before September 20, 2021, the Salad Storefront became an authorized vendor of controllers, headphones, and other gaming hardware devices designed by Turtle Beach and its subsidiary ROCCAT manufacturing brand.

Ongoing Development
Salad Technologies has announced ongoing research into "diversified workloads" for enterprise applications such as "medical research, massive AI experiments, engineering simulations, rendering workloads, and spot jobs from local IoT devices." . Recent staff commentary suggests that developers are investigating ways to leverage containerization technologies and the Microsoft Windows host compute service layer to securely distribute partial compute tasks to "individual nodes on the Salad network" using fully homomorphic encryption.

Computing Network
In corporate communications, Salad refers to its distributed network as "the Kitchen." Its current throughput is unknown. A Computer Weekly article from April 2021 benchmarked average network data transfer rates at 30 petaFLOPS, with peaks exceeding those of the "world's ninth-fastest supercomputer."

According to the Top500, that distinction would have then belonged to the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, a 448,448-core system capable of reaching peaks of 38.7459 petaFLOPS. Frontera's "petascale computing system" debuted in June 2019 after researchers were awarded a $60M grant by the National Science Foundation.

Community Engagement
Salad's official community Discord server has accrued over 40,000 subscribers as of November 2021. In August 2021, Salad Technologies sponsored the Salad Cup, a competitive eSports tournament featuring prominent Starcraft II players from South Korea (such as 2016 StarCraft II World Championship Series victor Byun "ByuN" Hyun Woo). Later that year, Salad partnered with the Dallas-based Esposure gaming academy to sponsor events in local gaming communities. The first such event was the 15K Fall Series Championship, a live NBA2K tournament hosted by the Unified Pro-Am Association on October 3, 2021.

Company History
Salad Technologies was founded in 2017 by current CEO Bob Miles, an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur from New South Wales. Miles produced and appeared in The Green Way Up, a twelve-part television series that aired on the National Geographic television network in 2012. The documentary followed Miles and fellow engineers on a 12,000 km journey from Tasmania to Darwin in a vehicle powered by a homemade biodiesel engine. The series later streamed on Netflix in select regions.

After a career developing UAV guidance systems, Miles obtained seed funding from Utah-based investment firms Royal Street Ventures from Carthona Capital

Corporate Mission
According to the company's mission statement, Salad aspires to create "the easiest, most trusted way to share compute resources." The brand refers to its shared computing network as a "computesharing community" on a mission to "reclaim the web's compute capacity."

In a press release, co-founder Miles explained the startup company was founded in response to growing data demand that outpaces the processing complexity forecasted by Moore's Law. .Miles touted distributing computing networks as "Web3 infrastructure" capable of providing elastic computing resources "at a fraction of the cost" of conventional cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure.