Distriblets: Java‐based distributed computing on the Web

Abstract

Describes a system for using the World Wide Web to distribute computational tasks to multiple hosts on the Web. A programmer with a computation to distribute registers it with a Web server. An idle host uses this server to identify available computations and downloads a Java class to perform the computation -we call this class a distriblet. The paper describes the programs written to carry out the load distribution, the structure of a distriblet class, and our experience in using this system.

An applet‐based anonymous distributed computing system

“…When the computations are completed, the applet returns the results to the server. This approach is a further development of previous system versions described in Brennan et al (1998), Carlson et al (1999) and Finkel et al (1999).…”

“…There have been two earlier versions of the distriblet system, described in Brennan et al (1998), Carlson et al (1999) and Finkel et al (1999). In the first version, the Helper Computer could be configured to automatically download a computation whenever it was idle.…”

“…At this point, the client node may request additional data from the distributor for execution of another computation piece. This approach is used by at least three ADCSs ± the SETI@home project (SETI@home, 1999), distributed.net (Distributed.net, 1999) and the original distriblets project (Brennan et al, 1998;Finkel et al, 1999). The SETI@home project uses a distributor node to co-ordinate the work of client nodes to download radio telescope logs to search for evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life.…”

Pando: Personal Volunteer Computing in Browsers

“…Fabisiak et al [43] have surveyed more than 45 different browserbased volunteer computing systems developed over more than two decades. They grouped the publications in three generations, that followed the evolution of Web technologies: the first generation [28,32,37,46,81,90] was based on Java applets; the second generation [33,34,60,77] used JavaScript instead but was somewhat limited by its performance; and the third generation [39,41,63,73,74,76,85,89] fully emerged once performance issues were solved in multiple ways: JavaScript became competitive with C [57],…”