Pando: Personal Volunteer Computing in Browsers

TL;DR

Pando is a browser-based volunteer computing platform that leverages personal devices' browsers to parallelize compute-bound tasks, demonstrating significant throughput improvements across various network configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel declarative concurrent programming model for personal volunteer computing using JavaScript, WebRTC, and WebSockets, enabling flexible, distributed computation.

Findings

Pando improves throughput over single devices for animation and image processing.

It successfully deploys across local networks, national grids, and wide-area networks.

The system demonstrates robustness and flexibility in diverse network environments.

Abstract

The large penetration and continued growth in ownership of personal electronic devices represents a freely available and largely untapped source of computing power. To leverage those, we present Pando, a new volunteer computing tool based on a declarative concurrent programming model and implemented using JavaScript, WebRTC, and WebSockets. This tool enables a dynamically varying number of failure-prone personal devices contributed by volunteers to parallelize the application of a function on a stream of values, by using the devices' browsers. We show that Pando can provide throughput improvements compared to a single personal device, on a variety of compute-bound applications including animation rendering and image processing. We also show the flexibility of our approach by deploying Pando on personal devices connected over a local network, on Grid5000, a French-wide computing grid in a virtual private network, and seven PlanetLab nodes distributed in a wide area network over Europe.