(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-05-12)
Miller, Daniel Menachem
Current community grid projects, such as IBM's World Community Grid (www.worldcommunitygrid.org), have successfully developed standalone applications to connect thousands of clients to one huge network of users. Each client donates their machine's idle time to compute mathematical operations to help solve multiple humanitarian projects requiring massive amounts of data to be computed (examining tissue microarrays, human proteome folding, ect). These projects have been relatively successful; however, there are multiple design problems that hinder a multitude of users to join the network.
These problems include yet are not limited to:
● Required user registration and email verification
● Once a user registers, a large standalone application to transmit and receive data from a central server is required to be downloaded and installed
● The program runs as a background process and is only active when a user's computer is idle
● The program may not work due to firewall restrictions on the client machine
This research, as shown by prototype, eliminates all of these barriers. No registration, no installation, no required idleness, and no firewall issues.
According to Adobe/Macromedia, roughly 96-98% of all home computers have the Flash Player installed. This figure is greater than any operating system, browser, program, or other virtual machine (including Java).
The purpose of this research project is to determine whether it is possible to create a grid community on the Internet utilizing browser technologies such as Flash and or AJAX technology.