That’s a cute article here. Daniel Vaughan has a project that uses browser-hosted Silverlight applications for the web-based grid computing. Basically the Silverlight CLR dynamically loads and executes tasks in the browser, then sends the results back to the server.
Good thing is that this approach makes it is easy to participate in any grid computing project. You just need to have the Silverlight on your machine and visit some web-page.
Bad thing is the same: it is too easy to participate. You could get involved into some computing project without noticing it. Chances are that later on someone would try to offer rich [Whatever]Light content on his web site (i.e.: online games, videos) while additionally running some low-priority tasks in the background. This sounds like “CPU tax” to me.
Rinat,
Thanks for raising this point. It’s an important one.
Indeed, it’s also important to note that users should be made aware of any background operations occurring that are not immediately related to their activities, especially ones involving data traffic. At this point the onus lies with the site owner. Perhaps it’s time to embed better browser controls for limiting and controlling traffic.
I do, however, envision that the long term benefit of Legion-like projects may be born by a fundamental shift to decentralization of the client-server model, leading to a democratization of the web. But then, perhaps I’m being too idealistic.
Daniel
Daniel, welcome.
I believe the data traffic itself could not be a big issue. After all we can control it easily (i.e.: just like the Adblock extension does it for Firefox). Anyway if the site owner decides to run some computing on the client, traffic control will not stop him from that.
The problem could be with the controlling what exactly happens inside the black box.
CPU control? That’s rather tricky (valid applications would run CPU-intense calculations, too)
Community control? (social networks marking some sites as hosts for the hidden calculations). Probably could do that.
Yes, some kind of the change in the web would happen. Evertime when there’s new technology that lets do some things easier, there are always new ideas being implemented with that. Some of these stay and change.
Legion concept could improve the overall CPU utilization by making it extremely easy to scavenge the CPU cycles.
Best regards,
Rinat Abdullin