An applet‐based anonymous distributed computing system

Abstract

Anonymous distributed computing systemsA number of approaches have traditionally been used in research and practice to build distributed computing environments using a set of networked machines. These approaches include:. Autonomous systems, where machines run standalone, but users can explicitly access services on other machines, such as remote login or file transfer.. Distributed operating systems, which hide the details of the network and the existence of multiple machines from the user, providing the abstraction of a single virtual computer system. All of the machines in the system are under the control of a single administrative domain.. Network file systems, the most common distributed computing environment, in which mostly autonomous machines share file systems located on remote file servers. Here, too, a single administrative domain controls the machines.Against the backdrop of these traditional approaches has arisen a new approach that seeks to solve distributed computing problems on a scale not possible with previous approaches. We refer to this approach as anonymous distributed computing (ADC) and these systems as anonymous distributed computing systems (ADCSs) (Ciaraldi et al., 2000).An ADCS consists of three types of nodes: distributor nodes for distributing pieces of a distributed computation, client nodes for executing these pieces and reporting results back to a distributor node, and portal nodes for serving as central sites where client nodes can be directed to distributor nodes. In general, these three types of nodes are not under the same administrative control.ADCSs have several distinguishing characteristics:. They consist of potentially millions of client nodes, each anonymously providing a piece of a distributed computation.. The client nodes can vary widely in processing speed, memory capacity, and architecture.

Browser-based Harnessing of Voluntary Computational Power

“…Second role is called host in Javelin, executor in Alchemi, seller in POPCORN, helper computer in [29]. This is a party voluntarily contributing its computing resources to solve the problems submitted by job creators.…”

“…distribution computer in [29] or Knitting Factory's directory service in [6], broker name service in Javelin 2.0 [63]) and contains addresses of second part, servers willing to dispatch the jobs (e.g. computation servers in [29]). We will use job scheduler/dispatcher terms.…”

“…For example, in [29] computation server implements light-weight web server, which only answers the workers' requests. In [6] a lightweight web server is used to distribute java classes to browsers.…”

“…In the first-generation of browser-based voluntary computing proposals, jobs were implemented as Java applets (called "distriblets" in [29] and "computelets" in [64]). Typically, the applications were listed at a website.…”

“…[19]. Other problems used in experiments were: DES code breaking [10], matrix multiplication [16] [68], Traveling Salesman Problem [16][24] [67], Mandelbrot generation [69] [70], searching for Mersenne primes using LucasLehmer primality test [56] [29], Collatz hypothesis verification [56], the factorization of large integer into two primes and Pearson correlation evaluation on set of genetic samples [9].…”