Meta Computing

Abstract

With the continuous improvement of information infrastructures, academia and industry have been constantly exploring new computing paradigms to fully exploit computing powers. In this paper, we propose Meta Computing, a new computing paradigm that aims to utilize all available computing resources hooked on the Internet, provide efficient, fault-tolerant, and personalized services with strong security and privacy guarantee, and virtualize the Internet as a giant computer, that is, "Network-as-a-Computer, NaaC", or "Meta Computer" for short, for any task or any person on-demand. Meta computing possesses the following three functional characteristics: supporting zerotrust environments, integrating all available computing resources, and configuring meta computers on-demand. We also present an architecture for meta computers, analyze the most-influential emerging endogenous applications of meta computing, and put forward open technological challenges to realize meta computing.