Comments on: Distributed computing in JavaScript

By: Guy

Guy — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 09:26:54 +0000

Think what could be achieved if Google or Facebook would ask their users to contribute some of their browser power for the benefit of some data processing projects.

There are many academic projects that could use this IMO, mainly in the field of bioinformatics.

By: Ashley

Ashley — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:59:51 +0000

That must be a glad news to hear. I am wondering whether it will work really

By: Kory

Kory — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:40:15 +0000

http://seniorproject.korykirk.com

I created a distributed implementation of Pi in hexadecimal using javascript (before I ever saw this) it can be found above.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:26:02 +0000

As proof of concept I realized a motion detection in Javascript. This is actually something more practically useful… A PDF with the details is available at: http://mjpg-streamer.wiki.sourceforge.net/space/showimage/Distributed+Computing+and+Image+Processing+in+JavaScript.pdf

By: cali

cali — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:48:48 +0000

this was actually implemented in the svn testing version of beef (bindshell.net) about 3 years ago. Proof of concept was good but unfeasible as gpu’s and standard cpu’s are a lot faster. It was estimated you’d need 2 million+ hosts, to get any benefit, and then your limited by connectvity. If a host goes down you lose their solution.

Nice try though

By: jroelofs

jroelofs — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:29:11 +0000

nonetheless, very fascinating research.

By: jroelofs

jroelofs — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:27:28 +0000

i really don’t see this being all that useful, that is unless the computation being done takes significantly more time than a couple of ms. for most problems, it would be faster to compute locally on one decently fast machine. if the problem is not embarrassingly parallel or even if there is a lot of data to move around there will be too much overhead. for this to work you’d need problems that are very simple to specify and whose answers are also really simple (read: brute-force crypto & genetic algorithms).

By: James

James — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:45:23 +0000

There’s an interesting moral(?) question to this though – if sites could sell processor time of their visitors computer for someone elses computational needs, unless they make this very clear from the outset they are effectively stealing both bandwidth and processor performance from the end user. It’s analogous to a viral folding client.

By: TehDooMCat

TehDooMCat — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:19:52 +0000

Aww damn, I got beaten to it :P

I was working on a distributed computing in javascript concept myself. All mine did at the time I forgot about it is generate custom md5 rainbow tables, with hashes 6 to 20 characters long… of no real use when it comes to cracking passwords. It -did- work though, and it didn’t use up too much processing power.

Methinks the way to make it fully invisible to the user and not hog their system is, if it’s implemented using setInterval, start at an interval of 0 between iterations and increase the interval ’til it’s higher than the average time it takes to run the function.

“Uhm, how about loading enough work units to consume 10 seconds of time on a “standard” pc that would have to be computed to post a comment on a blog?”

I like this idea and might just implement it on the registration form of the forums I’m developing ;)

By: DarkFader

DarkFader — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:06:57 +0000

No worries about security and exploitability.
And if it calls a trusted math library in ActiveX form, all the better!

By: Mycroftxxx

Mycroftxxx — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:43:34 +0000

Uhm, how about loading enough work units to consume 10 seconds of time on a “standard” pc that would have to be computed to post a comment on a blog?

It seems likely that there’ld be some side-benefit to forcing spammers to develop more efficient javascript engines.

By: SOOPERGOOMAN187

SOOPERGOOMAN187 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:08:50 +0000

I think if you embedded a small applet in all pages on the net then that would help to smooth the processing requirements out. You said to expect weird spike to the processor but if implemented the right way that would never happen. It would only need to share a small portion from each computer connected. Eventually with all pages exhibiting this it would be a continuous sharing of resources, if that makes sense to anyone else but me.

By: Timothy

Timothy — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:02:03 +0000

It’s amazing to see the direction that JavaScript is going.

By: bWare

bWare — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:35:17 +0000

Maybe this is what Google’s Native client is about?

By: Fowl

Fowl — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:11:30 +0000

If only *all* of the major browsers supported web workers and did so in a way that they were schelduled properly so they don’t make browsing take a back seat to computing the universe.