For those of you who did not notice, we had another ReSum and SumSum last month. This putting together of all minds in the company, meeting face to face, has resulted into a renewed focus and updates to some plans. More info will be coming out in due time but suffice to say that we will be merging efforts with several teams into a single new flexible base node that is going to carry all our efforts towards Ict, Coordicide, and, of course, Qubic.

The base node currently carries on the Bee name and will be written in Rust. It will include most of the common node components that are needed by all projects, all tied together with a flexible messaging architecture. The actual projects will be built on top of this. This means that some boundaries between projects will disappear and we can move people around to help out where necessary more easily.

The base node will be based on the experiences we had while building each project and borrows several elements from those projects that we found would result in the best modular architecture. To make good usage of our resources most original Omega team members will be focused on building this new base node. The new design is such that the functionality of several IXIs will be absorbed in the new messaging architecture without sacrificing the flexibility of the architecture. It should allow for easy and flexible insertion and replacement of modules and it should also minimize repetition of efforts by multiple projects.

The new architecture supports the Qubic supervisor component directly and will make integrating the Q-node functionality more easy. And because the basic requirements for any node are now clear we can already start building this base node while the Coordicide team finalizes their specifications. So once these specifications appear we will be able to directly start implementing them on a working base node. Doing it this way removes a bottleneck where otherwise we would have had to wait for the specifications first before we would have been able to start working on the Coordicide node.

This last part is where the importance of being able to meet face to face really stood out. In only a few days we were able to hammer out a solid proposal for the Bee node with the parties involved and clearly separate base functionality from specific functionality. That would have taken weeks of messaging otherwise.

Now let’s see what all this means for the projects.

Ict

Lukas and Samuel, together with community member /alex/ and a few others will start building the Bee base node. Once this common base node is done they will probably move on to adding the Ict-specific parts to get a working Ict/Bee again.

FPGA

The FPGA team just got bolstered by hiring Jonathan Shaffer (formerly known as Beeef). They are now working on a new idea that should allow us to run Abra-based tritcode directly on FPGA without the intermediate resource-intensive step of generating, compiling and synthesizing Verilog code. This is a breakthrough of huge magnitude. Instead of having to build from tritcode for every type of FPGA out there specifically, we now only need to generate tritcode once and can load and run it on the fly. We’re currently designing and building the first Proof of Concept of this new system.

Qupla

Part 7 in the series of articles that explore the depths of the Qubic Computation Model (QCM) is still nearing completion. With all the reshuffling my management duties took precedence and there was no time to finish it. But rest assured that I will make it happen soon(tm).

Evaldas (lunfardo) has been working in on the Qubic project and will probably take over some of my duties in that regard to allow me to help direct the overall development efforts on all projects that will use the Bee platform.

Coordicide

Wait. What?

Yes, with the integration of all projects in the same platform it seems only natural that we include the Coordicide efforts from now on as well. To be sure, this means that the Qubic status update has become a lot less Qubic-specific over time, and it may be that we will rebrand it to engineering update or something like that. We’re still deciding on that, but until that happens we will happily update you about any Coordicide specific news in this new section.

Until next time!