Democratizing Compute Power: The Rise of Computation as a Commodity and its Impacts

Abstract

This paper investigates the emerging concept of Compute as a Commodity (CaaC), which promises to revolutionize business innovation by providing easy access to vast compute resources, unlocked by cloud computing. CaaC aims to treat compute like electricity or water - conveniently available for consumption on demand. The pay-as-you-go cloud model enables click-button provisioning of processing capacity, without major capital investments. Our research defines CaaC, its objectives of ubiquitous, low-cost compute, and its self-service consumption vision. We analyze the CaaC technical model comprising a code/data repository, automated resource discovery and dynamic deployment engine. Innovations like spot pricing, provider federation and deployment automation are highlighted. Numerous CaaC benefits are studied, including heightened business agility from scalable compute, lowered costs from utilizing surplus capacity, and boosted creativity from removing innovation barriers. Despite advantages, CaaC poses infrastructural intricacies around seamless management across environments. Our work then elucidates CaaC's transformative capacity across verticals like healthcare, banking, media, and retail. For instance, healthcare workloads around genomic sequencing, drug discovery datasets, clinical trial analytics, personalized medicine, and more can leverage CaaC's elastic resources. Financial sectors can tap scalable computing to enable real-time fraud analysis, trade insights and security evaluations. Media production houses can parallelize rendering and animation via CaaC instead of investing in high-performance computing farms. Further CaaC innovations expected are elaborated like edge computing for reduced latency analytics, quantum computing for tackling complex optimizations, and serverless architectures for simplified access. In conclusion, CaaC represents an important shift in democratizing compute power, unlocking a new wave of innovation by making highperformance computing affordable and accessible. As CaaC matures, widespread adoption can transform businesses, industries, and society by accelerating digital transformation and fueling new datadriven competition. This paper serves as a primer on CaaC capabilities and provides both technological and strategic recommendations for its adoption. Further research can evaluate societal impacts of democratized computing and guide policy decisions around data regulation, algorithmic accountability, and technology leadership in the age of CaaC.