Atlas: an intelligent, performant framework for web-based grid computing

Abstract

This paper presents Atlas, a distributed computing system that allows for collaboration over Internet browsers. It allows users to donate the wasted processing power from their Internet-connected machines to help researchers and companies compute difficult tasks. The platform aims at maintaining similar speeds to available cloud computing services while running these tasks, while doing so at a lower cost. In order to do so, Atlas minimizes the amount of time needed per computation and intelligently distributes jobs by utilizing user browsing patterns. Benchmarks demonstrate that Atlas may be a viable alternative to traditional parallel platforms.