Gray Computing: An Analysis of Computing with Background JavaScript Tasks

Abstract

Websites routinely distribute small amounts of work to visitors' browsers in order to validate forms, render animations, and perform other computations. This paper examines the feasibility, cost effectiveness, and approaches for increasing the workloads offloaded to web visitors' browsers in order to turn them into a large-scale distributed data processing engine, which we term gray computing. Past research has looked primarily at either non-browser based volunteer computing or browser-based volunteer computing where the visitors keep their browsers open to a single web page for a long period of time. This paper provides a deep analysis of the architectural, cost effectiveness, user experience, performance, security, and other issues of gray computing distributed data processing engines with high heterogeneity, non-uniform page view times, and high computing pool volatility.