FU Berlin, Fachbereich Mathematik und Informatik, Institut für Informatik

Vortrag des Informatik-Kolloquiums

The Internet continues to expand at an amazing pace. We propose a Java-based infrastructure to globally harness resources, such as CPU cycles or disk storage, and make them available to users on the Internet. This approach is suitable for network computer owners seeking modest amounts of additional computational resources, but also has the potential for running coarse-grained parallel supercomputing applications involving thousands of cooperating machines on the Internet. Our approach is based on recent advances in Internet connectivity, and environments, such as the Java VM, that allow for the safe execution of untrusted code.

We have implemented a prototype based on Java that shows the feasibility of our approach. Our system - called Javelin - requires participants to have access only to a Java-enabled Web browser. Our prototype consists of hosts which register a fraction of their computing resources, clients which submit tasks, and brokers which map client computations onto the registered hosts. We discuss important research issues that must be addressed to make the envisioned infrastructure a reality.

Joint work with Bernd Christiansen, Peter Cappello, and Michael Neary.

Papers on-line under: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~schauser/papers