Hello everyone,

In this week’s Dev Letter, we zoom in on GPU exploration, securing decentralized projects with hardware enclaves, IBM Think 2018, the new applications on the iExec DApp Store, and the brand-new documentation page.

Exploring GPU Computing

During the past weeks, we’ve continued our exploration of GPU computing, led by Eric Rodriguez. We are now building two “home-made” mining rigs and we just received the hardware components we ordered.

We aim to deeply analyze the possibility of computing on GPU cards to help users, developers and resource providers within the iExec network.



Hardware Build List

3 ASUS GeForce GTX 1070

3 Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX 570

2 Intel Celeron G3900 (2.8 GHz)

2 Corsair Vengeance LPX Series Low Profile 4 Go DDR4 2400 MHz CL14

2 Enermax MaxTytan 1250W and 1050W

We will soon run and evaluate machine learning applications and any other scientific applications based on Nvidia Cuda librairies and OpenCL programming langage.

OpenCL is a promising framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms (CPU, GPU, FPGA, etc). We will focus on performance and cost for both users and resource providers.

How to Secure Decentralized Projects with Hardware Enclaves?

A new security trend consists of providing a hardware enclave to run applications in an inaccessible part of the CPU. Even the owner of the CPU isn’t able to access the data processed inside of this enclave.

With this cutting-edge technology, it is possible to run applications on a decentralized fashion even on untrusted nodes, because applications are no longer under the control of the decentralized node, but rather under the control of the initial user.

Currently available in early access, Data Guard on IBM Cloud, powered by Fortanix Runtime Encryption platform, uses Intel® SGX technology and offers easy to use and powerful services that accelerate the protection of decentralized applications.

With the use of enclaves, iExec is able to protect and scale the dapps leveraging the decentralized cloud composed of untrusted nodes.