Abstract:
The advent of the Java programming language, with its support for web-deliverable applets, has created a new, promising
parallel computing platform that we call WebComputing. This platform can break through the conventional boundaries
imposed by traditional distributed systems, such as DP, PVM, and MPI. The essential idea is that a master server,
or collection thereof, in league with a collection of web servers coordinates the execution of tasks by applets
running in parallel on an ever-changing set of unreliable, heterogeneous client machines. The promise of WebComputing
is the potential for achieving an unprecedented degree of parallelism. WebComputing research is in its infancy.
Answers to following questions are much needed.
The presentation covers three primary areas of WebComputing research pertaining to each of these questions, including a unique WebComputing system design, called the SWC framework, along with a performance evaluation of Java communication protocols.