Tupil Code Blog » grid computing http://blog.tupil.com (Get up early, code often) Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:50:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Grid Computing using Javascript http://blog.tupil.com/grid-computing-using-javascript/ http://blog.tupil.com/grid-computing-using-javascript/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:20:51 +0000 Chris Eidhof http://blog.tupil.com/?p=36 I recently had an idea that’s both really interesting and a bit disturbing. Authors of websites could use clients’ computers as a massive grid computer. If you have a problem that you can solve by using map-reduce, you could do the map step in the client’s web-browser, and let them send back the result. Most clients would never know you’re doing this, and by only using a couple of seconds from their processor time, they also wouldn’t notice.

The problems that you can solve this way have some interesting properties: you must never send any private data to the clients and typically the solution should be expensive to find, but easy to verify.

I’m curious what kind of cool appliciations we can build using this technology. If a major site like Facebook would include a tiny bit of javascript that takes 5 seconds of your processor time to help fight AIDS, it would probably be a tremendous help.

I would be very interested in your thoughts on this matter. Are there more problems that we could solve this way? I’m mainly interested in the technical implications, but there are lots of non-technical issues as well. For example: would you need the client’s permission to do this?

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