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@ipvm-wg

IPVM Working Group

Working Group for the Interplanetary Virtual Machine

What Is An IPVM?

To date, IPFS has been a project focused on data. IPVM is a specification for bringing content-addressed execution to content-addressed data on IPFS. To this end, the IPVM spec aims to be the easiest, fastest, most secure, and open way to run decentralized compute jobs everywhere.

Another way to describe IPVM would be "an open, decentralized, and local-first competitor to AWS Lambda".

The project leverages Wasm, content addressing, SPKI, and object capabilities to liberate computation from depending on specific prenegotiated services like the big cloud providers. Execution should scale flexibly from on-device by default all the way up to edge PoPs and data centers.

📋 High-Level Attributes

  • Wasm-on-IPFS
  • Declarative invocation (not an ABI, see section below)
  • Captured results, re-ingested to IPFS
  • A distributed scheduler
    • Single vs cron, local vs remote vs either, etc
  • Matchmaking
    • Poster/acceptor
    • Push-to-remote
  • (Global) memoization table & adaptive optimization
  • Managed effects (via an IPVM runtime)
  • Mobile (ambient) computing, compute-to-data, and data-to-compute
  • "The HTTP of Compute"
  • Stretch: autonomous agents

Implementations

  • Homestar - the core, Rust-based implementation and runtime of IPVM

Interop

🙅‍♀️ Antigoals: What An IPVM Is Not

  • A replacement of IPFS internals — that's wasm-ipfs
  • A language for distributed applications
  • A WASI interface
  • A new blockchain

🤹 Separate Projects

  1. Autocodec
  2. wasm-ipfs
  3. IPVM

These are related, but separate. The relatedness comes from the fact that if we have one Wasm engine in IPFS, then the other components can rely on it too.

👩‍💻 Get Involved

Presentations

Related Specs

External Resources

Pinned

  1. homestar homestar Public

    Homestar is the individual node that makes up the Everywhere Computer network (similar to how IPFS Kubo, Iroh, Nabu, or other implementation nodes make up the IPFS network). It's written in Rust an…

    Rust 175 18

  2. spec spec Public

    High Level IPVM Spec

    49 4

  3. workflow workflow Public

    IPVM Workflow Description Format

    4

  4. research research Public

    A short list of relevant research related to IPVM and the Homestar implementation of IPVM

    6

  5. northstar northstar Public

    4 1

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