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I made a website that does absolutely nothing, and I've proven to myself that people like to stay there - I've already logged 11+ hours worth of cumulative time on the page.

My question is whether it would be possible (or practical) to use the website as a distributed computing site.

My first impulse was to find out if there were any JavaScript distributed computing projects already active, so that I could put a piece of code on the page and be done. Unfortunately, all I could find was a big list of websites that thought it might be a cool idea.

I'm thinking that I might want to start with something like integer factorization - in this case, RSA numbers. It would be easy for the server to check if an answer was correct (simply test for modulus equals zero), and also easy to implement.

Is my idea feasible? Is there already a project out there that I can use?

Ben L.
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    When it comes to heavy lifting and efficient computing, Javascript really isn't the best language. – Matt Ball Jun 09 '10 at 15:47
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    Even if it isn't efficient, it's the easiest language to get people to run - There's nothing to install assuming you have a semi-up-to-date browser, and it can run in the background without a noticeable impact, assuming that it's implemented correctly. – Ben L. Jun 09 '10 at 16:31
  • Similar question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/1257818/472495 – halfer Mar 18 '13 at 00:18
  • I actually had the same idea for a hobby project that I am working on that requires a lot of processing. It could be run cross platform on phone, tablet even on a game console with no installer as you say! – K-Dawg May 16 '15 at 07:51
  • Actually, Javascript is very close to C in performance when run on nodejs... right now is not very popular in HPC, but I have the feeling that this is about the change. – cauchi Dec 07 '15 at 10:55
  • This is one of the active implementation of Javascript Distributed Computing https://zlelik.blogspot.nl/2016/11/unified-field-theory-with-javascript-distributed-computing-or-gravity-electromagnetism-relation.html – Zlelik Nov 07 '16 at 20:37

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Take a look at http://www.igvita.com/2009/03/03/collaborative-map-reduce-in-the-browser/ and http://www.igvita.com/2009/03/07/collaborative-swarm-computing-notes/

Sean Kinsey
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    Are there any active projects using this style, or should I create my own? – Ben L. Jun 09 '10 at 18:01
  • @Ben L. I'm very interested in the topic myself and I haven't found any project which produced something useful - at least that is publicly available. All projects differ very much from each other - some try to port mapreduce to js, others try to use google toolkit.. but I think that the idea itself has potential. – Dave O. Feb 13 '11 at 16:31