Introducing {functions} App Store for Computes.io Supercomputer

I have been thinking about how ecosystems thrive with App Stores and communities. I have also been thinking about how important it is that new developers reach “hello world” demos on a platform in 5 minutes or less. Neither of these scenarios exists in the world of supercomputers — until now!

Today computes.io is announcing the world’s first supercomputer App Store and we’re calling it {functions}! Functions is a Node.JS NPM module that references pre-built, super parallel-processing apps that can be run simultaneously across thousands or millions of computes.io connected cores. Each function consists of a simple input and output allowing developers to pipe/stream computing jobs and results from one core to another.

{functions} currently only has two apps in the app store; however, we plan to populate the directory with the apps used in our testing efforts soon. Pull requests on apps are also welcome ;) The two supercomputer apps include a sentiment analyzer (similar to IBM Watson’s Tone Analyzer) and an MD5 password cracker.

Developing with computes.io and functions is quite simple. So simple in fact that developers should be able to get to “hello world” in 5 minutes. Here’s a quick script that sends a text string into our sentiment function and returns a sentiment score based on the words used in the text:

The input is:

var data = "i love skynet";
job.compute(functions.sentiment, data, options);

The output is:

{ job: 'computes:be9a1fb0-e9f1-11e5-843b-7b8a8c144',
  result:
   { score: '3',
     comparative: '1',
     tokens: [ 'i', 'love', 'skynet' ],
     words: [ 'love' ],
     positive: [ 'love' ]
	 }
 }

The score is positive if the text string has a good sentiment or negative for bad sentiment. Computes even highlights the words that influence the score.

Here’s a quick video to demonstrate {functions} in more detail.