Pando: a Volunteer Computing Platform for the Web
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Volunteer computing is currently successfully used to make hundreds of thousands of machines available free-of-charge to projects of general interest. However the effort and cost involved in participating in and launching such projects may explain why only a few high-profile projects use it and why only 0.1 new web-based volunteer computing system designed to be easy to deploy and which does not require dedicated servers. The tool uses new demand-driven stream abstractions and a WebRTC overlay based on a fat tree for connecting volunteers. Together the stream abstractions and the fat-tree overlay enable a thousand browser tabs running on multiple machines to be used for computation, enough to tap into all machines bought as part of previous hardware investments made by a small- or medium-company or a university department. Moreover the approach is based on a simple programming model that should be both easy to use by itself by JavaScript programmers and as a compilation target by compiler writers. We provide a command-line version of the tool and all scripts and procedures necessary to replicate the experiments we made on the Grid5000 testbed.
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