Comments on: Map Reduce in the browser

By: pianoroy

pianoroy — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:07:16 +0000

Hmmm. Probably not a good idea to have visitors’ browsers doing computing work for you. Somehow I think people who do things like that eventually get into trouble…

By: antimatter15

antimatter15 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:14:23 +0000

The main problem with any serious distributed computing task in Javascript is that the tasks would have to execute unnoticeably (where WebWorkers and Gears may help with), but also in the short time span for about 30 seconds. SETI@Home and Folding@Home work with relatively large datasets and relatively large operations. To the point of which the costs of networking all the users may be larger than the cost of computing it in a cloud.
A year ago, I did something similar for the purpose of breaking some MD5 hashes (No real possibility of this helping humanity, hash cracking is mostly malicious) (GAE server, http://jsdc.appspot.com/). I also made something that calculates pi (appjet server, http://distpi.appjet.net/).

By: wleingang

wleingang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:05:49 +0000

You guys must be hard up for stories… The guy might as well have written a Hello World application.

By: elfpoet

elfpoet — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:47:48 +0000

This would be perfect for something like SETI@Home, IMHO.