Ethereum Foundation Devcon2, 23 Oct 2016

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From YouTube: Ethereum for Resource Limited Devices

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/2/ethereum-for-resource-limited-devices

State of the union and roadmap for mobile, wearables, SBCs and IoT running Ethereum

Speaker(s): Bob Summerwill
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: updates, roadmap, wearables, iot, mobile, resource, constraint, devices, security, java, c++, raiden, raspberry, pi, light, client

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Devcon 2 was held in Shanghai, China on Sep 19 - 21, 2016.
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A

And if Bob is going to talk about something a little bit different state of the union and roadmap for mobile wearables, SBC's and IOT running aetherium.

B

B

Let's see if this works this time.

B

Hey: hey, okay, fantastic slides.

B

So hi I I'm bob sim well I've most of my career has actually been in the games industry at EA sports. I have been working on arm. Linux cross builds of the c++ client for the last year or so, and then, since february, I've been working for the foundation as well on the c++, client and various other things.

B

This is my desk in vancouver, got a Raspberry Pi here, its various other PI's, a no droid a project chip and in the background there I've got a Commodore 64 and an Atari I'm not trying to get a theory I'm thorough on. It would be great if we could but I think they're a little bit low spec, but I have been looking at.

B

Mobile devices and wearables, so what are resource constrained devices? There's lots of different kind of constraints that you might have I mean. Ultimately, all computing devices are constrained, but really it's talking about things which are less capable than desktop machines and there's lots of different dimensions that might be happening in you know you might be limited CPU. You know most desktops now, 64-bit.

A

B

32 is going to be around for a long long time. Lots of them in these kind of devices are just single core. They may be pretty low frequency as well limited memory limits, its storage, limited bandwidth, limited power as well, and also the OS itself may be limited. Lots of such devices are basically, you know single app at a time, so some kind of examples of these wearables you know be those smart rings or watches, or health tracking devices mobile devices, though they are very prevalent now they are very constrained compared to desktops, even tablets.

B

Same thing, games consoles people often don't think of those as being constrained, but they they are, and more generally, just in embedded devices. Lots of single board computers like Raspberry, Pi and really IOT devices of all stripes is really where this stuff gets interesting.

B

So I mean why: why would you care about having aetherium, you know on your SmartWatch or any such device? Well, really, when you look at mobile computing, I mean mobile. Computing. Now is mainstream computing for lots of people in the world, their smart phone that they get is likely their first computer and really, if you look at the specs on mobile devices, they are of comparable specifications to what desktops were not so very long ago.

B

You've got mobile and then, after that, wearable taking it down a bit edge. Computing is a term that you'll hear more and more in the coming years, really long along the theme that if you have billions and billions of devices they're not going to run client-server, there's no way that you can have some. You know mega farm that they're all talking to and waiting their instructions, devices need to become autonomous to scale and also really along Andreas's analogy boundaries. Security is a dying paradigm really.

B

You need individual notes to be working on the assumption that they are in a hostile place and they need to be responsible for their own security.

B

This is not new on my right hand, here, I have a Java ring, don't know if anyone is aware of the Java ring 1998 at the Java developer conference in 1998. This was a giveaway and what it is is a.

B

There is basically a chip in there running Java with a battery in there, and the external part is actually a physical contact and it was doing public key encryption in 1998, and this is how it was envisaged. It would be used lots of things that we're talking about now. Smart locks, the the the blue dot.

B

The way that that works is you would you would physically touch your ring onto on to the blue button that would do signing using the private key that was in this device and really I mean barring the fact that you haven't got NFC at that point. It's a lot of the sort of things that we're looking at now coming right up to the future.

B

This is the Samsung gear s, 3 SmartWatch, just being announced, but not released. Yet on my other wrist I have a an s2 which is pretty similar spec to it. But if you look at this, you know you've got a you've, got a dual core: ARM chip, 3/4 of a gig of memory, 4 gig of flash storage not only Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but also LTE and GPS.

B

Accelerates a gyro heart rate, monitor and so on and and I mean. The other thing that you have on this device is actually you've got a GPU with hardware accelerated to 3d graphics, on your watch.

B

So this kind of caliber of devices- obviously you know it's it's kind of top-end for that.

A

B

It's indicative of how even these constrained devices are really moving up in spec, but it's expensive.

B

Project chip, nine dollars and what you have there again, you know you've got a system on a chip, an arm device. You've got a Mali GPU, you know nearly as good as speck, but it's nine dollars.

B

If you go down lower you're, not gonna, run a theory on this, but espresso systems who are shanghai-based this chip. You can get it for about for about $2 and it's it's about the cheapest kind of Wi-Fi capable device you can get. You know again. 32-Bit risc chip I mean very, very low specs, but this kind of price point and this kind of caliber of device is likely to sort of creep up in specs to some of those higher ones over the coming years.

B

So you know that that kind of price point is not inconceivable for running an aetherium capable device in the near future.

B

This is a quote that you, you know. This is a figure that you see all the time is so you know, gonna be 50 billion IOT devices by 2020 looks like the consensus on that has come down to 30 billion, which is you know, it's less, but it's still gigantic number of machines.

B

So you might be thinking you know some of this stuff that you're saying here, Bob off I- think I've heard this before.

B

So this is Paul Brody, who was previously at IBM, leading project, adept and- and here is Henning- who I believe is here later in the week and project depth was unveiled in January, 20 2015, using Tallahassee, BitTorrent and etherium, and there are follow-on projects which are still going here, which is really looking to to blend blockchain and IOT, and these efforts are still really ongoing, though the projects are changing. This is still what we're all aiming for, and this is a slide from one of the the project to DEP ones, which is basically showing this.

B

This really long-term progression through from the 50s. You know really small number of mainframes through personal computers through mobile and on and on and on, and we are going to have a gigantic number of devices in the near future, though, who knows what the actual figures are going to be so I mean across that you've got a sliding scale of options really for aetherium. You know the very easy thing to do on a very constrained device right now is basically not really to run anything on it, but have it talked to a trusted server?

B

You know just sign transactions and talk to a trusted. Server I think that's kind of the integration route that you can see on a lot of of mobile devices but, like client, is a big big step up to it. You know from that which is really you know it's it's. It's really then running as a standalone node. That is, you know, not assuming trust and then up through full node and archival, but as we as we've heard, if they're my client really really close now.

B

For myself, you know the question of why C++ for resource constrained devices. You know why. Why am I even bothering doing this?

B

Why am I even looking at this, rather than just you know the Geth, implementation and and really the reason is that if you, if you look at the the gains that were getting from Moore's Law, they are slowing down, you know, there's only so small you can get and we're kind of getting towards the end of the line on that Amdahl's law is something which a lot of people are not aware of, but it's gonna become very, very important in the coming years, and what what Amdahl's law is is is saying is that you know not everything that there is can.

A

B

Parallelized, you know to an infinite degree: programs do have you know critical path, pieces which are serial by nature and, depending on the parallel proportion that you have available.

B

You are basically capped on how much speed you can get by by adding more cores and and it's and it's a fact really- that for the majority of general-purpose programs that constant, it's probably really quite quite low, you know you see on on PCs, there's very few apps that can take advantage of you know four, eight, sixteen cause you just end up with multiple apps running in parallel, so I mean what that means is. Is raw performance does ultimately matter?

B

You know, you see now also compiler settings optimizing for power usage that where you're running from batteries, actually the you know the power drain, it does matter also modern C++ doesn't suck any more. Most C++ is not modern C++, but you can write C++ apps that look fairly similar to other ones, but, most importantly, is maximum portability is C and C++.

B

You know they are the language which pretty much all OSS and systems programming is done in so really when you, when you're looking at these very constrained devices having the raw power of of C++, does actually matter.

B

So cross cpp aetherium, is, is what I've been working on for the last year in a bit and it's dhaka files and bash scripts to cross, build cpp aetherium to to arm linux, and you know we have the first successful cross built binary is in november of last year. It's been largely stalled since then, and especially since february, when I joined the foundation and then I've been just working for the foundation on foundation, things not on my own project here.

B

But very soon I will be starting on my client. Implementation for C++ I did receive a grant for that which I'm very grateful and I hope to actually do some work on that soon.

B

So number of devices have had success for this already Yolo phone running sailfish OS, also a bun two phone, a goodly variety of single board, computers and I'm, targeting further SBC's and Tizen and Android and iOS. Very low demand really for for x86 for Intel arm is where it's at.

B

Looking beyond my work, peter has had go. Aetherium cross builds working for a goodly amount of time there on on arm arm, 64 and, more recently on mips as well. Interestingly,.

B

The light client work so Zolt we'll be presenting on his progress on light client as well, and the stats here are from John Garrett's on what he is seeing of that le s branch running on a Raspberry, Pi 3, so so the binary 25 mag the chain data only coming in at 50/50 mag, only using 12 percent of CPU and the high high watermark on the RAM of 162, so I mean these figures are very much very, very doable on a lot of these devices.

B

Nine nine minutes, therefore, ahead of sync, the the smallest device that I'm aware of that we've got etherium running on so far as a Raspberry Pi, a which is a very, very weedy device, and that was full clients as well. That was prior to any of this le s work. So it's quite conceivable that we can that we can have etherium running on something even we do than or asbury pi a and getting down to some really really very minimal devices and whisper. You know so. Whisper development has restarted quite recently.

B

That's also something which is going to be very applicable for these kind of devices and also Raiden I, haven't got on slides here. I'd kind of forgotten, but Raiden is gonna, be very, very applicable to these kind of devices.

B

So you know what are the ultimate constraints on on running aetherium on on limited hardware, so yeah I mean the specs there on the Raspberry Pi model, a you know, it's a single core, only 256 mega memory, 700 megahertz, that device can run full client. The problem is that the you know the full sync on that it can barely keep pace that no longer a problem, though, if you're running like client so I mean you know what are the ultimate constraints. Well, the CPU is got to be able to execute the the VM fast enough.

B

You know this kind of collaborative device can do that. You've got to have enough memory. I'd! Imagine that's gonna stay around the same, even with like client, even through Casper as well, and you need to have enough storage for blocks, though the storage bottleneck. There really goes away quite a lot with with like client, when you're running a full, node and you're having to sync from from the start, the you know the performance can really matter.

B

You know having an SSD makes a huge difference, but that's only really relevant if you're doing a load of work and the aim is not to do a load of work anymore and the network connections got to be good enough.

B

So yeah we're gonna, see aetherium on a lot of devices and they are going to be very, very weak devices and they'll be able to cope just fine. There are multiple threats of work going on to reduce the resource needs, so you know we we can cope now and the demands are gonna, get a lot lower, so it's only gonna get better. Thank.

A

You so much Bob and.

B

There we go yeah.

B

We'll be a delight with blockchain.