RABC: A Conceptual Design of Pervasive Infrastructure for Browser Computing based on Ajax technologies

Abstract

We have developed the RIKEN Ajax Browser Computing (RABC) system. This system enables the simple realization of large scale Global Computing systems,like the SETI@home project, that take advantage of unused computing resources. Its greatest advantage is that an agent program, which has been traditionally required, does not need to be installed. Volunteers can participate by simply browsing to a webpage provided by the RABC system. This system allows greater CPU cycle resources to be acquired than traditional methods. We have evaluated a performance difference between JavaScript and legacy computer languages.

Browser-based Harnessing of Voluntary Computational Power

“…Whatever were the reasons, the idea of browser-based voluntary computing fell into the obscurity to the point that when it was reinvented in 2007, many authors were seemingly unaware of the existence of earlier proposals [9][44] [45].…”

“…In 2007, three solutions based on JavaScript and AJAX appeared [9][44] [45]. In each of them, JavaScript code embedded within HTML page was executed by browser when user visited the project site, using AJAX to communicate with server (to get tasks to execute and to return back the results), passing XML documents as request arguments.…”

“…The third solution, RABC (Riken AJAX Browser Computing) came from Japan [45]. RABC aimed at creating simple environment SETI@Home-like projects.…”

“…In 2007, JavaScript was between 9.8 to 23.2 times slower (depending on the platform ) than Java code for a simple mathematical task of random numbers generation [45]. Compared to C, the results were even worse: the browser-based JavaScript engine was between 20 to 200 times slower (depending on platform and browser) [44].…”

“…New volunteers could be recruited by sending email invitations and blog posts [45][58], social media [19] [83] or by being reported upon in popular new sites [79]. To attract new users, a flash widget used by OGC [61] allowed to inspect the news fetched from Yahoo Top Stories feed, and in theory could be used to allow social interaction or playing games.…”