Foundations for Open-World Compute: Homestar, an IPVM Tale - zeeshanlakhani
Channel: IPFS
Date: 25/04/2023

At Fission, we've been laying down the groundwork for an IPVM implementation called Homestar, a distributed compute engine built with IPFS and IPLD at its core, along with first-class support for the Wasm (WebAssembly) Component Model and Interface Types, a vision for managed effects, and primitives for open-world replayability, capability discovery (Ucan capabilities specifically), and execution coordination. In this talk, we'll predominantly focus on the deterministic Wasm subset of the engine, particularly on why we've sided with the Wasm Component model, how we bidirectionally translate between IPLD and Wasm Interface Types at runtime, and aim to achieve a legitimate "write once, run anywhere" ethos. We'll also dive into approaches related to the monumental challenge involving open-world interoperability, especially in the context of other distributed workflow frameworks and toward the goal of fault-oblivious computing.

References
========
Fission: https://fission.codes/
IPFS: https://ipfs.tech/
IPLD: https://ipld.io/
Wasm (WebAssembly) Component Model: https://github.com/webassembly/component-model
Interface Types: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/design/mvp/WIT.md
Ucan capabilities: https://github.com/ucan-wg/invocation

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IPFS þing is a week-long gathering for the IPFS implementers community - April 2023, Brussels, Belgium.