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arXiv · 1803.08426

Pando: Personal Volunteer Computing in Browsers

Erick Lavoie·Laurie Hendren·Frederic Desprez·Miguel Correia
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Abstract

The large penetration and continued growth in ownership of personal electronic devices represents a freely available and largely untapped source of computing power. To leverage those, we present Pando, a new volunteer computing tool based on a declarative concurrent programming model and implemented using JavaScript, WebRTC, and WebSockets. This tool enables a dynamically varying number of failure-prone personal devices contributed by volunteers to parallelize the application of a function on a stream of values, by using the devices' browsers. We show that Pando can provide throughput improvements compared to a single personal device, on a variety of compute-bound applications including animation rendering and image processing. We also show the flexibility of our approach by deploying Pando on personal devices connected over a local network, on Grid5000, a French-wide computing grid in a virtual private network, and seven PlanetLab nodes distributed in a wide area network over Europe.

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Erick Lavoie, Laurie Hendren, Frederic Desprez, Miguel Correia. 2018-03-22. Pando: Personal Volunteer Computing in Browsers. https://doi.org/10.1145/3361525.3361539

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