-- I apologize if you receive this message more than once
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