With this article I want to talk about the swarm intelligence that will be part of IOTA’s Qubic Project. This project includes Smart Contracts, Oracles and Qubic. Part of this is the outsourced computation. This opens up entirely new areas of application and highlights the true benefits of IOTA. Qubic is much bigger than anything we have seen so far from IOTA, and it’s starting soon. With this article I’d like to shed some light on the concepts and implications of this groundbreaking technology. Outsourced computation has been known to us for some time.

Outsourced computation, an important service provided by cloud computing, has become more and more popular. In the context of outsourced computation, computationally weak clients (or devices) can outsource their computation and data to a server in the cloud. While this approach has numerous advantages in cost and functionality, it is crucial that the outsourcing mechanism compromises the privacy of the outsourced data and the integrity of the computation, since the server in the cloud may not be fully-trusted. The ultimate goal in secure outsourced computation is to design protocols that minimize the computational cost of the clients, and maintain the confidentiality and integrity of its data.

Cloud Computing — the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. Cloud Computing can be a heavyweight and dense form of computing power.

Fog computing — a term created by Cisco that refers to extending cloud computing to the edge of an enterprise’s network. Also known as Edge Computing or fogging, fog computing facilitates the operation of compute, storage, and networking services between end devices and cloud computing data centers. While edge computing is typically referred to the location where services are instantiated, fog computing implies distribution of the communication, computation, and storage resources and services on or close to devices and systems in the control of end-users. Fog computing is a medium weight and intermediate level of computing power. Rather than a substitute, fog computing often serves as a complement to cloud computing.

Both cloud computing and fog computing provide storage, applications, and data to end-users. However, fog computing has a closer proximity to end-users and bigger geographical distribution.

Mist computing — a lightweight and rudimentary form of computing power that resides directly within the network fabric at the extreme edge of the network fabric using microcomputers and microcontrollers to feed into Fog Computing nodes and potentially onward towards the Cloud Computing platforms

Until now, everyone has been focused on cloud computing, fog computing, and edge computing. Until recently we could perform Internet of Things computations in four general areas: We could compute in an external cloud, which means on one or more servers in a data center somewhere remote. We could compute “on prem”, which means on one or more servers in the enterprises’ local network. We could compute in the fog, which means on a gateway in the OT (Operational Technology) network or on a router or switch or some other network node in the IT (Information Technology) network. Or we could compute within in the IoT device or product, which means on an on-board embedded device.

We are now seeing a new class of computing surface emerge called the Mist. The Mist consists of the edge, that is, the very edge: the sensor and actuator controllers. Extending computing all the way to the edge can make a lot of sense depending on the network topology needed. For OT networks that are lossy and/or have low bandwidth, performing aggregation, fusion or filtering directly on the sensor could be handy. And since communications take 5x the power of computing, Mist computing may be a great fit for low power situation where extending battery life is of paramount concern. My favorite use case however is to use the Mist for parallel computing — solving big problems by breaking them up into smaller ones on smaller processors.

Mist computing is the result of everything computing everywhere. That’s exactly how Computes works.

This is where IOTA Qubic comes into play. IOTA Qubic will combine the benefits of fog and mist computing to create a new system that goes far beyond that. The Qubic website https://qubic.iota.org/intro explains the project of Qubic outcourcing computing:

For any computational device, there will always be tasks too resource intensive for the device to compute, or tasks that require data beyond what is locally available. This is especially true for the devices that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices are typically limited by lack of memory, processing power, energy availability, or all of the above. What if such low power devices could simply outsource intensive computations to an external, more capable machine? Qubic enables exactly such outsourced computations, and allows secure, permissionless participation for consumers and producers alike. The protocol allows anyone to create or request to run a computational task on one or more external devices, which in turn transmit the results back to the requester. Similarly, anyone can find tasks and participate in processing them. As with oracle machines, this processing takes place in a decentralized and secure way, with the Qubic protocol ensuring that the results can be trusted to a high degree of certainty.

This kind of swarm intelligence is part of the IOTA revolution and will far exceed the current benefits of Iota in the future.

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6. Jones, Jake. “Edge Computing: The Cloud, the Fog and the Edge”. SolidRun. Retrieved 6 August 2017.