Globally distributed computation over the Internet-the POPCORN project

Abstract

The POPCORN project provides an infrastructure for globally distributed computation over the whole Internet. It provides any programmer connected to the Internet with a single huge virtual parallel computer composed of all processors on the Internet which care to participate at any given moment. The system provides a market-based mechanism of trade in CPU time to motivate processors to provide their CPU cycles for other peoples' computations. Selling CPU time is as easy as visiting a certain Web site with a Java-enabled browser. Buying CPU time is done by writing a parallel program, using our programming paradigm (and libraries). This paradigm was designed to fit the situation of global computation. A third entity in our system is a market for CPU time, which is where buyers and sellers meet and trade. The system has been implemented and may be visited and used on our Web site: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/-popcorn.