iExec Dev Letter #19: Intel and RSK Collaborations, Updated Whitepaper, Submit Button, 6 New DApps for Scientific Computing — May 17, 2018
On May 29, iExec will release its V2 product at Blockshow Europe in Berlin. In this version, we’re introducing a new element that will become central to the iExec cloud: the marketplace.
This release marks a change of paradigm in the cloud industry, because it will allow the trading of computing resources as commodities, in the same way we observe with resources such as oil, gold or rice. Version 2 will also provide an easy-to-use interface so that users can see how the market is evolving in real-time.
The iExec Whitepaper 3.0 Is Out
To prepare for this release, we have given the iExec Whitepaper a new look, and complemented it with new sections to better outline our vision and plans for a blockchain-based decentralized cloud.
Intel and iExec Collaboration: Privacy-Preserving Offchain Computing
Intel and iExec have started a collaboration on privacy-preserving offchain computing. In a joint presentation with Intel, iExec has performed a live demonstration of its product using Intel SGX solutions during Consensus 2018. This collaboration was initiated in the context of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), iExec and Intel both being members of the Alliance.
The two companies have launched a new EEA working group focusing on off-chain capabilities. Privacy has been a long-running issue in the development of the blockchain ecosystem. iExec and Intel’s collaboration is one more step towards the full adoption of the Ethereum blockchain for businesses.
RSK and iExec Partnership: Off-Chain Computing for Bitcoin Applications
The RSK project is continuing the legacy of Bitcoin pioneers by building turing-complete smart-contract capabilities for the Bitcoin blockchain. By partnering with iExec, RSK pushes these capabilities further by allowing its decentralized applications to access the same on-demand and scalable cloud computing resources than Ethereum. Learn more about the advantages of this partnership for developers and its next steps in the following post.
DApp Store: A New Button to Send Works
Thanks to this new addition, users can now submit works from an application page directly to workers, and get a result back once their computation is completed.
Scientific Computing by iExec: 6 New DApps
6 new dapps have been added to the iExec DApp Store. These applications present an example of how the decentralized cloud can power computationally-demanding applications used within the scientific community.
Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python
Scikit-learn is a free software machine learning library for the Python programming language. It features various classification, regression and clustering algorithms and is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy. Scikit-learn is currently being used by Spotify, Evernote, Booking.com, OkCupid or INRIA.
OpenFOAM: the Ultimate Solution for Continuum Mechanics
OpenFOAM is an C++ toolbox for the development of customized numerical solvers and utilities for the solution to continuum mechanics problems.
It has a large user base across most areas of engineering and science, from both commercial and academic organisations and has an extensive range of features to solve anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid mechanics and electromagnetics.
It provides the option to customize or use several open source tools developed by other OpenFOAM users.
GNU Octave: Mathematical Modeling and Simulation
GNU Octave is a high-level programming language, primarily intended for complex numerical computations. It provides a command line interface for solving linear algebra problems or for finding the roots of nonlinear equations as well as integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations.
It is easily customizable via user-defined functions written in Octave’s own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran, or other languages.
Gmsh: A 3D Finite Element Mesh Generator
Gmsh is a finite-element mesh generator developed by Christophe Geuzaine and Jean-François Remacle. It contains 4 modules: for geometry description, meshing, solving and post-processing. Gmsh supports parametric input and has advanced visualization mechanisms.
Gnuplot: Interactive Mathematical Visualization
Gnuplot is a command-line program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits. It is frequently used for publication-quality graphics as well as in education. The program runs on all major computers and operating systems. It was originally created to allow scientists and students to visualize mathematical functions and data interactively, but has grown to support many non-interactive uses such as web scripting. It is also used as a plotting engine by third-party applications like Octave.
President Face Recognition
This application builds on the Scikit-learn dapp to perform recognition of president faces. Using eigenfaces and SVMs, the goal of this example is to show how an unsupervised method and a supervised one can be chained for better prediction.
The algorithm comprises of 3 steps:
- A preliminary step that reduces the dimension of the input with a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the number of variables while retaining as much as possible the information.
- A training step that trains a support-vector-machine classification using the radial Basis function (RBF) kernel.
- An evaluation step that predicts the president’s name on the test set.
Thank you!
The whole team would like to thank our amazing community for its recent support and feedback. This is extremely valuable for us, and we’re always reading you. Our resources are now fully focused on our product release planned for May 29 in Berlin. We’ll conduct an AmA session in preparation for this major milestone. Stay tuned for more details!
And just in case you missed it, hereby our two latest highlights:
iExec on social networks
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- Blog: https://medium.com/iex-ec
- Slack: http://slack.iex.ec
- Telegram: https://goo.gl/fH3EHT
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/iexec/
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- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/iExec
