[announce] naclgrid 0.1 (desktop grid engine) released

[William Le Ferrand <William.Le-Ferrand@polytechnique.edu>]

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Dear list,

I'm am very happy to announce the first release of naclgrid, a light desktop
grid engine written in jocaml and relying ocsigen.

Basically, it's a server where

++ you can upload tasks, tasks being shared libraries that follow some basic
rules. In particular tasks have two functions, one returning a list of
subtasks and another one that would gather the results. They also refer to a
worker for this specific task.

++ you can participate to queued tasks simply by browsing a webpage. When
you do so, you download an atomic task and a worker, which is a 'google
native client' binary. It's a standard C program compiled for the google
native client. Google native client is a plugin for your browser that
performs static analysis on your (native) library before running it in a
sandbox: thus you get both safety and close-to-native speed in a browser.
When the subtask is done another task is downloaded and so on ..

The package embeds two examples, one based on a knn and the other one being
some md5 distributed computation.

Compared to existing solution (Boinc ..), naclgrid does not require to
install a specialized rich client and provides strong safety features : the
worker can't compromise your system (according to google ..). Thus you get a
multi task and very flexible desktop grid.

I've build a website for this software : www.themipsfactory.com. There is a
demo video and of course the source code of naclgrid (its GPL v3). It's a
bit tricky to install as one has to build ocsigen with jocaml but it should
run fine. I'm writing documentation too. There is also a google group,
naclgrid-dev (http://groups.google.fr/group/naclgrid-dev), for all the
questions regarding the installation and for suggestions.

If you have any remarks, both on functionality and style, do not hesitate!
And if you know how I can package it in a better way, please tell me!

All best!

William

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