The Paderborn University BSP Web Computing (PUB-Web) Library

Recently, there have been many approaches to use the idle-times on the many computers distributed all over the whole world for computation-intensive tasks; all these idle-times together represent a really gigantic computation power. These approaches have been realized by providing so-called clients which computer owners or administrators can download and install in order to donate their unused computation power to large-scale projects on a voluntary basis.

All these projects have in common that the problem to work on has to be split into many small subproblems by the central server; the clients (they are often designed as a screen saver doing the work in the background) download a subproblem, solve it, send the result back to the server, and continue with the next subproblem.

With these approaches, computation actually takes place in parallel, but only independent subproblems can be solved because there is no communication between the clients.

PUB-Web removes this restriction: the idea is to execute massively parrallel algorithms on computers distributed all over the internet, communicating with each other and synchronizing themselves according to the Bulk-Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model.

Like the participants of the other projects mentioned above, all the participants of PUB-Web have to download and install a client. In contrast to these other projects which only need a connection to the internet when uploading the results or downloading new subproblems, PUB-Web requires a permanent internet connection due to the continuous communication; beside a direct connection to the internet, also dial-up connections are an option because PUB-Web tolerates short network errors (e.g. interruption due to a reconnect) and even IP address changes.

I have developed PUB-Web during my (PhD) studies. Please visit the project website for further information http://pubweb.cs.uni-paderborn.de/.