WeevilScout

Web Browser Distributed Computing

The performance gain being achieved by current JavaScript virtual machines raises the question whether Internet browsers can become the next scientific computing platform. Distributed computing requires suitable resources. These resources, to date, have been supercomputers, clusters, grids, clouds, and desktop computers. WeevilScout is a novel framework described in this paper Distributed Computing on an Ensemble of Browsers that uses a new kind of resource that hitherto has been overseen and left untapped, namely the humble Internet browser. With 2 billion users online, computing through Internet browsers has the potential of amassing immense resources thus transforming the Internet into a distributed computer ideal for common classes of distributed scientific applications such as parametric studies. As a proof of concept we demonstrate how a cluster of globally distributed Internet browsers is used to compute thousands of bio-informatics tasks.