Rust NYC: Zero Knowledge Proofs & GPUs in Rendering

About this event

Join us on Thursday, October 8th at our sponsor Materialize. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. to give attendees plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and the talk begin at 7:15 p.m.We have two incredible speakers for y'all! John Wu is a Research Engineer at Nethermind and will be speaking on Building Zero Knowledge Applications in Rust. I work in cryptography and high-performance computing: my research is on making zero-knowledge proofs much faster, which turns out to be as much about data representation and memory behavior as it is about the mathematics. One thing that buys you: proving your identity directly from a government-issue id without having to share your personal information like name or address to other people. Before that I built security tooling for Apple's SRE team that deployed seamlessly onto Kubernetes across AWS and Apple's bare-metal machines, consensus and networking systems for Mina Protocol's zero-knowledge blockchain, and operator lowerings in LLVM's torch-mlir. I like ZK most when the math and the machine code have to agree. This talk demystifies zero-knowledge proofs for Rust developers by breaking them down from first principles: arithmetic constraints, witnesses, finite-field polynomials, sum-check, commitments, and folding schemes. We'll explain how a computation becomes something a prover can convince a verifier about, without revealing the underlying data. Then we'll connect the math to real implementation work with a Rust case study: a small-value optimization I implemented in Microsoft's open-source prover, speeding up exactly the repetitive hashing and signature checks that a passport proof is built from, by letting small values stay small instead of paying full field width for every one. That's what makes the application real — proving your identity from a government passport in real time, rather than as an offline batch job. The goal is to leave attendees with both a conceptual map of ZK and a concrete feel for how high-performance proving systems are built. Austin Matthies is an engine/animation systems programmer and will be speaking on how Rust intersects with GPU compute and graphics through modern graphics APIs. How can we leverage the power of modern GPUs to perform rendering while offloading our massively parallel work via general purpose compute? In this talk, we will explore how to utilize Rust, Modern Graphics APIs/frameworks, and the open-source software ecosystem to build fast, efficient, and reliable applications. Many supporting libraries can be found in Rust, but we will consider where C++ libraries can accelerate our progress. Next, we will compare shading languages and cover interoperability of graphics APIs and vendor-specific compute frameworks. Lastly, we will address some common challenges that may come up when developing your application Lawrence Harvey (https://www.lawrenceharvey.com/) is Rust NYC's official recruitment partner, with Ross providing support as a co-organizer and financial support. The space is generously sponsored by our partner Materialize.