Distributed Computing on an Ensemble of Browsers

2011

Abstract The emergence and wide adoption of web applications have moved the client-side component, often written in JavaScript, to the forefront of computing on the web. Web application developers try to move more computation to the client side to avoid unnecessary network traffic and make the applications more responsive. Therefore, JavaScript applications are becoming larger and more computation intensive.

Sufyan bin Uzayr, Nicholas Cloud, Tim Ambler , 2019

The notion that “technology moves quickly” is a well-worn aphorism, and with good reason: technology does move quickly. But at this moment, JavaScript in particular is moving very quickly indeed—much like that “torrent of chatter moving at the speed of light” that Matthew Flaming refers to in The Kingdom of Ohio. The language is in the midst of what many have called a renaissance, brought about by the rapidly increasing sophistication of browser-based applications and the rising popularity of JavaScript on the server, thanks to Node.js.

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2012

Improvements in web browser performance and web standards compliance, as well as the availability of comprehensive JavaScript libraries, provides an opportunity to develop functionally rich yet intuitive web applications that allow users to access, render and analyse data in novel ways. However, the development of such large-scale JavaScript web applications presents new challenges, in particular with regard to code sustainability and team-based work. We present an approach that meets the challenges of large-scale JavaScript web application design and development, including client-side model-view-controller architecture, design patterns, and JavaScript libraries. Furthermore, we show how the approach leads naturally to the encapsulation of the data source as a web API, allowing applications to be easily ported to new data sources. The Experiment Dashboard framework is used for the development of applications for monitoring the distributed computing activities of virtual organisations on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. We demonstrate the benefits of the approach for large-scale JavaScript web applications in this context by examining the design of several Experiment Dashboard applications for data processing, data transfer and site status monitoring, and by showing how they have been ported for different virtual organisations and technologies.

2012

Browsers have become mature execution platforms enabling web applications to rival their desktop counterparts. An important class of such applications is interactive multimedia: games, animations, and interactive visualizations. Unlike many early web applications, these applications are latency sensitive and processing (CPU and graphics) intensive. When demands exceed available resources, application quality (e.g., frame rate) diminishes because it is hard to balance timeliness and utilization. The quality of ambitious web applications is also limited by single-threaded execution prevalent in the Web. Applications need to scale their quality, and thereby scale processing load, based on the resources that are available. We refer to this as scalable quality.

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, 2015

Websites routinely distribute small amounts of work to visitors' browsers in order to validate forms, render animations, and perform other computations. This paper examines the feasibility, cost effectiveness, and approaches for increasing the workloads offloaded to web visitors' browsers in order to turn them into a large-scale distributed data processing engine, which we term gray computing. Past research has looked primarily at either non-browser based volunteer computing or browserbased volunteer computing where the visitors keep their browsers open to a single web page for a long period of time. This paper provides a deep analysis of the architectural, cost effectiveness, user experience, performance, security, and other issues of gray computing distributed data processing engines with high heterogeneity, non-uniform page view times, and high computing pool volatility.

2012

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, now run full feature browsers capable of handling rich media and web content. The emergence of HTML5 makes the browser an ever more attractive platform for application developers. In addition, improvements in JavaScript engines are further shrinking the performance gap between native applications, typically written in C and C++, and web apps, those written in web-based technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). However there is still one area where native applications can show significantly better performance: compute-intensive functions, such as complex image and audio processing algorithms, are considered beyond the reach of JavaScript. This work looks at removing this last deficiency from the web application platform. Specifically we show how high-performance compute capabilities of multi-core CPUs and programmable GPUs can be made accessible to web applications and then discuss the standardization of this technology and its implementation for a mobile browser.

Parallel JavaScript Machine, 2024

This paper presents a new programming model that can utilize multi-core CPU systems in a simple and auto-balanced way. This model also proposes an easier programming paradigm for developing parallel tasks and systems in most massively parallel computation areas, such as weather prediction, nuclear physics, search engines, etc. In recent times we are facing a new shift in computing philosophy, caused by advance of new hardware architecture and even better performance. Multi-core architecture will become prevailing technology in the near future. What can we do in order to take advantage of this? This paper is about one of the possible solutions we can have.

2002

This paper presents an environment for supporting parallel/distributed programming using Java with RMI and RMI-IIOP (CORBA). The environment implements the notion of shared objects (SO), distributed shared objects (DSO) and introduces active shared mobile objects (ASMO). The Environment of Shared Objects for Web (ESOW) provides an environment to passive objects (lists, queues and stacks) and active objects (process). This environment simulates a distributed shared memory (DSM) with security, good performance (load balancing), reliability (fault tolerance) and transparency. It makes it possible for computers to share two "abundant" resources on the Web: memory and processor. Then the Web is seen as a pool of processors for sharing. We present a test with evolution strategies to solve multimodal functions with many local minima. We confirm also that other tests have validated the use of ESOW in metacomputing.

Future Generation Computer Systems, 1999

Parallel computing on local area networks is generally based on mechanisms that specifically target the properties of the local area network environment. However, these mechanisms do not effectively extend to wide area networks due to issues such as heterogeneity, security, and administrative boundaries. We present a system which enables application programmers to write parallel programs in Java and allows Java-capable browsers to execute parallel tasks. It comprises a virtual machine model which isolates the program from the execution environment, and a runtime system realizing this virtual machine on the Web. Load balancing and fault masking are transparently provided by the runtime system.

2016 28th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 28), 2016

In this paper we describe LiveTalk, a framework for Collaborative Browser-based Replicated-Computation applications. LiveTalk permits multiple users separated across the wide area to interact with separate copies of a single application, sharing a single virtual workspace, using very little network bandwidth. LiveTalk features an integrated, browser-based programming environment with native graphics and live evaluation, an integrated, pluggable web server, and a simple messaging service that serves to coordinate activity on shared application sessions, and provides for multiple, mutually-isolated sessions. The first use case for LiveTalk are collaborative big-data visualizations running on thin-client devices such as cellular phones, tablets, and netbooks. These applications form part of a new class of application where the distributed Cloud is leveraged to provide low latency, and high-bandwidth access to geographically disparate users while maintaining the feel of immediacy associated with local computation. The primary motivation of this work is to permit low latency, collaborative applications to be built quickly and easily, while requiring no setup for use by the end-user.