Volunteer computing

The explosive growth of interest in platform-independent programming languages for the WorldWide Web , such as Sun Microsystems' Java, is opening exciting new possibilites in parallel computing. This thesis will present and investigate the idea of volunteer computing, which will allow people to volunteer their computers' processing power towards solving a large parallel problem by simply visiting a web page. Because it requires no prior human contact and very little technical knowledge from the client user, volunteer computing makes it possible to very easily build very large networks of computers working together in parallel. This makes supercomputing more readily accessible and \closer to the masses", and at the same time makes it possible to achieve new heights in performance through the formation of parallel computing networks involving many thousands, or even millions, of computers distributed around the world. This paper proposes thesis research which aims to expose and investigate the issues and problems involved in implementing and using volunteer computing by developing a working general-purpose volunteer computing programmingand execution environment based on Java and using it to create applications of diierent types. In this paper, we identify some key issues and discuss ways in which they can be handled.