The problem InterPlanetary Compute System solves

The aim is to do the same thing to compute what IPFS did to storage. Essentially decentralizing the compute layer of applications among the network provides censorship resistance along with the fact that the same function evaluations between different applications can be shared. For ex., a neural network relies on many matrix multiplications and convolution. By making these primitive operations decentralized and shared among the network nodes, we can significantly improve the performance of the applications using them.
Another use case can be lets say the cloud providers decide to not allow a particular application to be hosted on their platform, this will be bad for humanity and can be solved by having a decentralized compute layer along with the already existing decentralized storage solution (IPFS).

Challenges we ran into

• It was our first experience with writing zk proofs and we had very little understanding of the maths behind it, so we had a hard time navigating through the SnarkyJS library and the documentation of the mina protocol. It was tough to create a zero-knowledge circuit using Snarkyjs because our use case required the verification to be done on the client side itself.
• All of our team members had recently delved into the web3 world and that's why had a tough time delving into the web3 tooling and infrastructure.