The Essence Agent – The brains of the Essence Platform

Essence is a New Architecture for Computing

Unlike operating systems that are separate from middle-ware and applications, every software product based on Essence has Agents, Powers, Skills, and Media packaged together as a unified Essence package.

Legacy Software Platforms (Operating Systems and their core applications), and the various files required to operate, are measured in gigabytes.

Whether running as a virtual machine (Essence VM), as an appliance (e.g., Essence for Ubuntu) or without an operating system (Essence Noir), Essence is a fraction of the size of legacy platforms. This is possible because the code that Essence needs to operate is quite small.

For example, Essence for macOS, Linux, and Windows boots up from a ~128 kilobyte Agent package in approximately 1 millisecond. The Agent processes any required fixed code (as Powers). Then it regenerates millions or billions (whatever is needed) of lines of machine instructions for operating, in real-time. The regenerative instructions are deleted after they are used, often within milliseconds of being created. Packages of fixed code are hot swapped in/out of memory on demand, which has the added benefits of efficient resource utilization and greater security (e.g., reducing the attack profile for fixed code).

The amount of fixed code required vs. generated instructions is determined by the user, conditions (changing machine workload, energy, and operating modes) and changes in the data source used.

Transcending Operating Systems

Essence is not an operating system. It is a new approach to regenerating machine instructions, integrating them with written code and data based upon pre-loaded developer and user expressed wants.

While Essence is like a unikernel, its runtime regeneration of machine instructions to maximize speed or space or wattage, and its per-info-unit security allows it to apply a new approach to computing.

Two Primary Ways of Deploying Essence

1. Essence automatically generates, adapts, and/or optimizes computer-readable machine instructions for parallel processing in response to its evaluation of memory latency, number of data fetches, number of instruction cycles, order of instructions in the instruction pipeline, size of the cache, wattage consumed by each series of instructions, and the modes of the underlying chip and instruction set architecture chosen.
2. The Essence Platform allows packages of solutions to be created and deployed as virtual machines or native applications (both compliant with a host operating system) or hardware-direct (no operating system needed) instantiations.

More Than 11-years in the Making

Essence is the result of an 11-year project that took a fresh look at computing with the goal of creating a more human-centered, reliable, secure, efficient (space and energy), and high-performing approach to computing. This required rethinking and innovative approaches to operating systems, management of system files and data, and the tools needed for improving the software development process.

Several prototypes and released software products have been created using Essence. However, additional platform tools are needed to make Essence ready for use by the software developer community. These are short duration projects that will enable us to deliver Essence and the evolution of software to wantware that it makes possible. Our own internal developers are creating apps in minutes or hours without writing any code.

What is an Essence Agent?

Agents are singular executable programs with various operating system privileges when built for an external OS or a direct-to-hardware scheduling and calling system when built as an appliance.

The Agents’ role at startup is to load the Origin, Host, User-Style & User-History wantverses (a customizable Essence world).

1. Origin – Origin is the starting wantverse filled with foundational ideas and abilities for all platforms. It includes all the foundation Ideas, Records, Actions, and SpaceTimes for interfacing between human and machine.
2. Host – a specific wantverse with as many device specific capabilities exposed as possible.
3. User-Style – an individual users’ wantverse of the style/design/terms/etc.  and personal wants on a particular machine, not everywhere
4. User-History – a wantverse storing the users’ past events.

Machine Instructions Regeneration and Acceleration

The Essence Agent, present in every application/Aptiv, allows us to combine and remix existing AI algorithms (e.g., TensorFlow, Caffe, etc.), other code written by engineers, with Agent generated auto-tuning, auto-scaling and auto-synching algorithms all on the fly.  The result is an AI Superset (combination of many AI algorithms executed at the same time).

The Agent provides higher levels of parallel execution than any other solution to date. This enables computing systems to do more with less compute resources and data samples. When the task is bigger, simply add more hardware and the Agent dynamically adapts.

Test have been performed across many architectures. Tests via a 2011 Mac Pro resulted in reduction in processing time from 32 minutes (serialized) to 18.8 seconds (parallelized) and 103X speedup of the task.

Eliminating serial code and detecting other limiting factors (e.g., I/O bottlenecks) at runtime makes the key difference.