Vast quantities of compute (GPU cycles on personal workstations, idle inference servers, and edge devices between jobs) go unused because no incentive-aligned protocol exists for their owners to share them safely and profitably. Existing approaches either require a trusted central coordinator (cloud marketplaces), demand heavy blockchain infrastructure (Golem, BrokerChain), or lack an incentive layer entirely (BOINC, Petals). We propose SwarmHarness, a decentralised protocol in which HarnessAPI skill nodes self-organise into a compute swarm without any central authority. SwarmHarness has three interlocking components: a SwarmRegistry built on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for peer discovery and capability advertisement; a SwarmRouter that dispatches tasks to nodes using a utility function over capability, load, latency, and trust; and SwarmCredit, an incentive mechanism that attributes compute-credit rewards to contributing nodes via a Shapley-value approximation. Nodes earn credits by serving tasks and spend credits to submit them; idle nodes that never contribute drain credits and lose routing priority, creating a self-regulating participation economy. As nodes specialise toward high-reward skills and routing signals act as digital pheromones, the network exhibits emergent collective intelligence analogous to biological swarms. Beyond compute sharing, SwarmHarness is a foundational primitive for autonomous distributed AI agent networks in which agents hire compute, route subtasks, and settle credits without human intermediation.

翻译：大量计算资源（个人工作站上的GPU周期、空闲推理服务器以及作业间隙的边缘设备）因缺乏激励对齐协议而未被使用，该协议本可使其所有者安全且盈利地共享资源。现有方法要么需要可信的中心协调器（云市场），要么依赖庞大的区块链基础设施（Golem、BrokerChain），要么完全缺乏激励层（BOINC、Petals）。我们提出SwarmHarness，一种去中心化协议，其中HarnessAPI技能节点可自组织成计算集群，无需任何中心化权威机构。SwarmHarness包含三个相互关联的组件：基于分布式哈希表（DHT）构建的SwarmRegistry，用于对等节点发现与能力广告；SwarmRouter，通过基于能力、负载、延迟和信任的效用函数将任务分派给节点；以及SwarmCredit，一种激励机制，通过Shapley值近似将计算积分奖励归因于贡献节点。节点通过执行任务赚取积分，并消耗积分提交任务；从不贡献的空闲节点会耗尽积分并失去路由优先级，从而形成自我调节的参与经济。随着节点向高回报技能专业化且路由信号充当数字信息素，网络展现出类似生物集群的涌现集体智能。除计算共享外，SwarmHarness还是自主分布式AI智能体网络的基础原语，智能体可在其中雇佣计算资源、路由子任务并结算积分，无需人类中介介入。