Introduction to ZKP Hardware Design
On Saturday, November 19th at 12PM at House of Web3, Danilo Sijacic, a Doctor of Engineering Science (PhD) from KU Lueven , a Cryptographic Hardware Engineer currently working for ulvetanna.io will be talking about the development of Zero Knowledge Proof processing architecture - from the old (Neu), ::pun intended:: to the modern end-to-end enterprise grade ZKP platform.
Abstract:
The von Neumann CPU architecture dominates the computational machinery well over half a century. Simplicity and versatility of said architecture, combined with the technology scaling adherence to Moore's law, allowed astronomical increases in computational power. However, Moore's law is grinding to a slow halt as we approach 1nm transistors. Modern systems increasingly rely on computationally heavy mathematics to allow "mathemagical" technologies such as neural networks, fully homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).
The latter are the topic of this talk. In the long run, ZKPs hold the potential to be the backbone of finance and completely obliviate bureaucracy as we know it. For now, their main applications lie in the blockchain domain. Private, scalable and cheap transactions are of prime concern in this field. Ongoing research is spawning new schemes daily, many focusing on evaluating virtual machines on blockchains in zero-knowledge. Theoretical work and prototyping is maturing as we speak, however, deployment strategies still seem to revolve around von Neumman CPUs and GPUs. In this talk, we illustrate the inherent flaws of the von Neumman architecture in the context of modern ZKP systems. Then, we move to illustrate a holistic design strategy for an end-to-end enterprise grade ZKP platform. We start from custom processor architecture design targeting different ZKP targets; with the end goal of building out data centres specialised for ZKP.
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