Screen Saver Science: Realizing Distributed Parallel Computing with Jini and JavaSpaces

Screen Saver Sciencetm (SSS) is a distributed computing environment in which useful computations are performed on a set of participating computers whenever their screen savers are activated [4]. In contrast to other distributed computing projects, such as SETI@Home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu), the compute servers of this system, that is, the part that runs within the screen saver, will not consist of a dedicated scientific application. The SSS server will have no particular calculation embedded in it at all, but instead will be capable of performing any computation, subject to local resource constraints such as the amount of memory available. This is made possible through the use of applications compiled to portable Java bytecode along with the Jini and JavaSpaces technologies that have been enabled by the Java environment. Another fundamental difference between SSS and other distributed computing projects is that SSS servers can communicate with each other during the computation in order to coordinate the computation, rather that simply exchanging data and results with a central job manager, thus presenting a distributed parallel computing model to the SSS application programmer. Also, a calculation running in an SSS server can submit one or more new calculations back into the SSS system. This project will explore the issues involved in building a production quality SSS computing environment for routine use by computational scientists. Parallel algorithms suitable for this environment will also be developed and tested. We expect to show that this is possible with a minimum of extra software needed above the basic Java/Jini/JavaSpaces software that is currently available. We intend to develop a small set of Java packages to be used to develop applications