Incentivized Testnet Phase 2: The Orchestrator Update

In July this year, Blockless Network invited users across the world to take part in an important phase of our deployment: getting inside The Orchestrator, our workload allocation system.

On Blockless, The Orchestrator (our automated orchestration mechanism) fluidly handles the distribution of compute resources. Users working from ordinary laptops will contribute power to simpler tasks, while those running more specialized machines take part in workloads calling for a little more computing muscle. As the name suggests, The Orchestrator keeps everything harmonious by assigning participating devices to the jobs which are optimal for their specs, considering attributes like location, internet speed and hardware capabilities.

In this phase of our testing, however, we ‘deactivated’ The Orchestrator and asked our users to manually perform its crucial functions. In essence, we turned a key piece of Blockless infrastructure into a real-time puzzle game.

We wanted to give our community an in-depth look at exactly how Blockless’ unique modular architecture works, and a sense of our network’s potential.

How are they getting on?

We couldn’t have asked for a better response. To date, over 2.5 million workloads have been manually completed by participating users — of whom there are over 50,000. Our temporary Orchestrators have performed their duties with impressive efficiency, completing workload batches in an average time of just 19 minutes.

On the Blockless mainnet, users will be rewarded for the amount of time they spend contributing compute to the network. We’re scoring our Orchestrator experiment in the same way: the more time a user accrues Orchestrating, the higher their position on our leaderboard.

We began our test by releasing a small amount of workloads across several ‘maps’, planning to ramp up the scale over time. But user demand was above our expectations, and we found that we needed a lot more workloads to enable our Orchestrators to keep playing. Even when we flooded the system with new compute workloads, our users kept on processing the tasks at an impressive cadence — naturally, we’re delighted that the gamified Orchestrator has proven so popular, but we did still want the average person to be able to take part.

We increased the output of workloads, batching our releases into eight-hour slots covering different timezones, and we raised the stakes by introducing a penalty function for incorrectly processed workloads.

Today, those eight-hour slots are being completed within 15 minutes. To meet demand, we’re releasing 35 new batches of workloads every two hours. We want to enable everyone who has followed Blockless’ journey so far to participate, whatever their timezone.
More updates are to follow soon, but in the meantime you can stay connected with ourselves and the wider community here.