Summary: The Java Market:
Transforming the Internet into a Metacomputer
Yair Amir 1 , Baruch Awerbuch, and Ryan S. Borgstrom 2
Department of Computer Science
The Johns Hopkins University
yairamir, baruch, rsean@cs.jhu.edu
Abstract.
Most of the machines that are connected to the Internet are idle a significant fraction of the time.
This paper presents the Java Market, a system that allows organizations and Internet users to make use
of this wasted computational power.
Using the Java programming language and the Web technology, the Java Market is the first
metacomputing system that can seamlessly take advantage of machines of any architecture, anywhere
on the Internet. Every user on the Internet can contribute their machine's computational resources just
by pointing a Java­capable browser to the Java Market web page. Similarly, users can launch jobs to
the system by posting them on the Web and registering them with the Java Market.
In contrast, other systems that allow sharing of computational resources between machines over the
network require homogeneous system architecture. They often involve extensive installation or even
kernel­level modifications to the operating system.
1. Introduction
The wasted CPU cycles on idle machines can more profitably be put to use solving

Source: Amir, Yair - Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences