Hello! We're , a community scale AI system being run out of Z-Space , a non-profit arts & technology society in Vancouver.
Shared Computer Network, or SCN, is what it says - a set of shared computers.
We have a few computers running proxmox, ansible, Lite LLM, and other infrastructure. atproto accounts can sign up, we approve them, they get issued keys, and are given instructions on how to use the OpenAI compatible endpoint in order to connect to the GPUs we have running a couple of different models.
We have some boxes we bought new, some used 3090s and 1080is, a 3090 donated by and shipped from NYC, another donation of 64GB of RAM, and software, hardware, model tuning and handwaving skills from , , and , plus more pitching in to help in different ways.
This is an already stale high level architecture view of some of the software pieces. Core infrastructure of databases and S3 and OIDC gateway and LLM proxy and an Automerge sync server, plus atproto services1. There will likely be a spaces-aware PDS soon.
And then some apps, like OpenWebUI, that connect over OIDC and so have all the keys and models connected.
It's all out in the open over at github/Z-Space-Society. And somewhere around tangled.org/sharedcomputer.network soon too.
The GX10 was on loan and gone back to its owner. We have a single Intel MAX 1100 GPU2 with 48GB of RAM in Salmon. (told you this was a bit stale!)
Community Scale AI
So that's all tech stuff and it's actually fun and we have a crew who are hacking on other things.
But the goal is to have local inference, and local apps, and workspaces where groups can work on data personally, or as a group, without everything being sent to big US tech giants.
OpenWebUI is...not very usable and we haven't found anything solid to build on. ThauraAI definitely have some shared vision, so maybe we'll try and contribute when they open source.
Looks like we're going to at least prototype a fully atproto agent chat for everyday use, with your data privately in permissioned data just for you. But a click away from sharing with a private workspace that you pool data for your community.
So here's the plan: we're going to try and figure out a software stack, and a hardware stack, and get coworking spaces and libraries and co-ops and anywhere else where people gather in local groups.
We've got a few more donations on the way, and some interested sponsors. in Toronto, 's folknet in Thailand, and many other future collaborations. Chatting with about layering on top / compatible.
The cloud is always someone else's computer: lets start making it that we know those someone people better, and that we are in community together.