JaWS: An open market-based framework for distributed computing over the internet

Abstract

Harnessing the power of idle personal workstations remains a challenge for large scale distributed computing. In this paper, we present the Java Web-computing System (JaWS), which simplifies the connection of heterogeneous machines in a global computing grid as well as the development of applications that exploit this computing capacity. Machines are assigned to applications via a dynamic market-based mechanism that allows machine owners and clients to change their requirements even in the midst of a computation. The system takes care of the main communication issues offering basic programming primitives that can be extended to develop class hierarchies which in turn support distributed computing paradigms. Due to the object-oriented structuring of code, development becomes as simple as implementing a few methods.