iEx.ec & Stimergy Deliver the Hottest Smart Contract … Literally
Announced at Devcon2, the iEx.ec project leaded by INRIA and the Stimergy start-up in France are proud to announce, for the first time in history, the provisioning of a distributed data-center through a smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.
The Stimergy company, located in Grenoble, France is designing servers that have this very particular thing that the heat produced by the processors is scavanged to warm water. Hence, those servers are called data furnaces. Data furnace are typically located in the basement of a building and the water is warmed before being distributed in the building. Similar servers are being deployed in several locations in France, including at the Butte-aux-cailles public swimming pool in Paris.
iEx.ec, located in Lyon, France and Beijing, China is designing Blockchain-based Distributed Cloud Market Network. Thanks to iEx.ec, resources providers will be able to rent their resources (data, applications, servers) using smart contract deployed on the blockchain. iEx.ec handles all the tasks of resource provisioning, data transfer, application deployment, execution and result certification. The technology that fuels iEx.ec relies on open-source software developped at the INRIA and CNRS research institute.
For the first time iEx.ec and Stimergy demoed Cloud resource provisioning from the blockchain. The demo consisted in the following steps:
- a smart contract describing an iEx.ec task is deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.
- a bridge monitors the transaction on this contract. When a transaction is detected, the bridge submits a new iEx.ec task.
- iEx.ec deployes the ISDEP application and the files required for its execution. When everything is ready, iEx.ec launches the computation and at the end, returns the results back to the smart contract client.
Simple ? But the exploit doesn’t stop here !
ISDEP is a simulation for nuclear fusion. ISDEP simulates a plasma in a tokamak reactor for the ITER project.
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and is also Latin for “the way”) is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject, which will be the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment. It is an experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor that is being built next to the Cadarache facility in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, south of France.
Nuclear fusion is often regarded as a very promising source of energy for the future. Because controled nuclear fusion can produce energy with almost no danger, and very few environmental footprint — in particular, no toxic waste.
So, I guess that you got the irony behind this story! We today provided the Grenoble student residency hot showers thanks to (simulated) nuclear fusion … 100 years ahead of time !
