Depth: Technical Insights into AO Hyper-Parallel Computer

Summary: AO is essentially an extension of the Storage-based Consensus Paradigm (SCP), which is actually a special case of sovereign Rollup. The core idea is to decouple computation from data availability/storage, allowing for on-chain data publishing/storage and off-chain computation/validation. With Arweave's high data-carrying capacity, DApp platforms based on the AO and SCP architecture can significantly reduce data publishing and storage costs, making it easier to facilitate support when there is a high throughput demands.

Author: PermaDAO

Translator: Zwi @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Marshal Orange @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Intro

AO is actually an extension of the Storage-based Consensus Paradigm (SCP), which is similar to a sovereign Rollup. The core idea is to decouple computing from DA/storage, and on-chain data publication/storage + off-chain data computation and validation. Since Arweave has extremely high data carrying capacity, the DApp platform based on AO and SCP architecture can greatly save data publishing and storage costs and facilitate support when there is a strong pursuit of throughput.

The prevailing understanding of Arweave focuses on the concept of permanent storage and has long been used as a storage layer by various projects. The most well-known narrative of Arweave was that it became the Library of Alexandria that will never disappear, with the ultimate goal of preserving the spark of human civilization.

Therefore, after the release of Arweave's AO computer, it was quite surprising that Arweave transformed into a parallel supercomputer. It should be pointed out that Arweave can still function as a storage layer. The AO architecture is a superposition of storage rather than a replacement.

AO, like SCP, allows for parallel execution of computing processes, thus enabling efficient computing capabilities. The processes of AO can be interconnected, and their data formats remain consistent. All data will ultimately be stored in the Arweave mainnet in accordance with the ANS-104 Bundle format. All logs of each process are completely stored, and the final process’s HolographicState is retained on Arweave.

The computing power of AO, combined with Arweave's permanent storage capacity, is actually an uncensored, omnipresent global high-concurrency computer. On this platform, DApps of any type, any language, and any public chain can access Arweave smoothly and enjoy decentralized computing services are cheaper but more efficient than Ethereum.

AOS, on the other hand, is slightly different. If AO is understood as computer architecture, then AOS is an an instance of an operating system. In essence, AO is an architectural system. Users need to interact with an operating system similar to AOS to use the corresponding functions. For the convenience of discussion, the term 'AO' is used uniformly below, but users need to be aware of the difference between the two.

TL;DR

• Arweave launches the AO architecture, aiming to transform into an all-round player both in storage and computation, changing the current market understanding of only storage concepts;
• Arweave's AO architecture is a functional overlay on storage, with the potential to communicate with any public chain and DApp;
• AO related technologies include distributed architecture SSI (single system image), Actor Model (erlang language but not a model) and SU/MU/CU unit components, among which concurrency and asynchronousness are the keys to understanding the ao architecture;