README.md

wasimoff

This is the codebase for the computation offloading and task distribution research prototype wasimoff. It is a framework which uses WebAssembly as its executable format and is able to send computational tasks to volunteers' browsers through a central broker. Targeting a modern browser API as an execution environment makes participation exceedingly simple, while the versatility of WebAssembly supports many different computational problems.

Publications relating to this project:

• Semjonov, A. (2023). Opportunistic Distributed Computation Offloading using WebAssembly (Master’s thesis. University of Hamburg).

• Semjonov, A., Bornholdt, H., Edinger, J., & Russo, G. R. (2024, March). Wasimoff: Distributed computation offloading using WebAssembly in the browser. In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops and other Affiliated Events (PerCom Workshops) (pp. 203-208). IEEE. (+ Artifact)

• Semjonov, A., & Edinger, J. (2024, December). Demo: Zero-Setup Computation Offloading to Heterogeneous Volunteer Devices Using Web Browsers. In Proceedings of the 25th International Middleware Conference: Demos, Posters and Doctoral Symposium (pp. 3-4).

Essential roles

The three essential roles Broker, Provider and Client can be found in their respective subdirectories.

• The Broker is a central entity to which all Providers connect and which then distributes tasks among them. Clients talk to the Broker to upload executables and queue tasks. It is written in Go and uses Protobuf messages over WebSocket connections.
• Providers are the participants that share their resources with the network. An important goal of this prototype was to implement the Provider entirely on the Web platform API, so it can run in the browser simply by opening a web page.
  • A Webprovider is written in Vue.js and uses Workers to execute the WebAssembly modules concurrently.
  • The exact same TypeScript code can also be run with Deno, thus there is also a CLI script to start a computational Provider in a terminal.
• The Client interface is either a simple HTTP API or also a WebSocket connection for asynchronous task submission. Examples exist using curl in Bash, as well as a CLI written in Go. It contains a number of examples on how to write job configurations.

WASI applications

The WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) was chosen initially as an abstraction layer for the offloaded tasks and the subdirectory wasi-apps/ contains a number of example applications, which use this compilation target to show off its versatility and serve as example workloads during the evaluation.

• ffmpeg is a compilation of the popular FFmpeg toolkit to WebAssembly. It can be used to transcode videos in a browser tab.
• helloworld is a collection of different languages (Rust, TinyGo, WAT) targeting basic features of the WASI target wasm32-wasi.
• travelling_salesman is an implementation of the .. you guessed it .. Travelling Salesman Problem in Rust. It can be compiled to various native binary formats but also to WASI and it serves as the computational workload in all of the evaluation runs.
• web-demo is a minimal example of using the browser_wasi_shim to execute WebAssembly binaries with environment variables and commandline arguments in the browser.

Experiments

The experiments repository contains various experiments and evaluations of pieces of the networking stack that were considered.

Containerized deployment

This repository includes a multi-stage Dockerfile, which:

• compiles the broker binary in a golang image,
• compiles the webprovider frontend dist in a node image,
• copies both to a barebones alpine image and
• prepares another headless provider with a denoland/deno image.

You can compile both main images individually with:

• docker build --target wasimoff -t wasimoff:broker . or make broker
• docker build --target provider -t wasimoff:provider . or make provider

Or, for a quick test environment, use the docker-compose.yaml file with:

docker compose up --build