Astra

Even after 200 years of countless medical breakthroughs, many life-threatening diseases still afflict vast swaths of humanity. Around 8 million people die from numerous types of Cancers worldwide every year. Nearly half-a-billion people suffer from Malaria every year and close to a million innocent children die from mosquito bites but we still don‟t have an efficacious vaccine against it. Heart diseases and strokes take the life of another 15 million people prematurely. And there is an ever present risk of new pandemics, like SARS, Ebola, and Zika, suddenly emerging and ruthlessly cutting short the lives of millions of children, women, and men. Discovering the causes and cures for the above perennial medical challenges requires our scientists to explore myriad potential paths quickly and then focus on the most promising ones for further research. In modern medicine, the exploration of various plausible paths quickly requires enormous computing power, which unfortunately our scientists do not have. However, all of us have powerful computers with capacity in teraFLOPS (1012) sitting idle at our homes, at work, in our pockets, and in our cars. If we can seamlessly combine our spare computing power for the above noble causes, then we can build the most powerful Supercomputer in the world. Astra is weaving together billions of devices to build one of the most powerful Supercomputer in the world with the processing capacity in exaFLOPs (1018) and storage capacity in zettaFLOPs (1021). This worldwide Supercomputer will be available to researchers around the globe. In addition, Astra is leveraging the latest Trust Machine1 technology to design an innovative Incentive System so that all citizens of the world are inspired to share their spare computing resources for worthy causes. People will be earning both Social Rewards and valuable Digital Currencies for their contributions (including the native currency of Astra ecosystem called STARs). The scientists in other disciplines, such as, Climate Change, Subatomic Physics, Astronomy, Genomics, Materials Research, Machine Learning, Economics, Linguistics, and Humanities also need endless computing power and storage capacity to solve intractable problems. The Astra Supercomputer will also be used by these scientists for path-breaking discoveries. In recent years another revolutionary invention has arrived on horizon that has the potential to empower people all over the world to thrive economically, politically, and socially and reach their full potential. It can make our economies superefficient and governance transparent and corruption-free. This revolutionary technology is Trust Machines which enables us to automatically establish and preserve collective social truths. However, the automation of trust requires keeping numerous copies (thousands) of a piece of information and constant communication among them for verification and synchronization. Thus, the Trust Machines are extremely compute, storage, and communication intensive. The Astra Supercomputer will be used for building and maintaining these Social Trust Machines and earning valuable Digital Currencies for the community members (Bitcoin, Ether, ZCash, Dash, Monroe, STARs, etc.).