A Distributed Updatable World VM using WASM

Simon Worthington leads this session at the WebAssembly conference WASM I/O 2023, Barcelona. He tells us the story of how to build a distributed global computer and how it is being implementing in the Bacalhau Project. Listen to his session now:

Bacalhau is the distributed compute network from Protocol Labs, and open-source R&D lab building to radically improve the Internet. Bacalhau’s mission is to provide the next generation of serverless compute that can bring forth revolutions in decentralised science and distributed applications. Our goal is a global, updatable, resilient compute substrate that can run anywhere, on any device, without restrictions.

WASM is the secret behind our new platform. We’ve leveraged the power of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) – a distributed data storage system – to build a global library of WASM tools and functions that can be run from anywhere, by anyone. Our system can automatically link together WASM modules from across IPFS, no matter where they are, and can update itself when new versions of modules become available. This all adds up to a global execution environment, running WASM, that ensures compute processing done by scientists and engineers today can be reproduced long into the future.

In this talk, he explains the vision and how the technology works, demonstrates the network in action and shows how attendees can run their own WASM jobs on a distributed compute network without complex set up or technical challenges.