Pando: A Volunteer Computing Platform for the Web

Volunteer computing is currently successfully used to make hundreds of thousands of CPUs available free-of-charge to projects of general interest. However the effort and cost involved in participating in and launching such projects may explain why only a few high-profile projects use it and why only 0.1% of Internet users participate in them. We present Pando, a system designed to be easy to deploy and which does not require dedicated servers. It enables a thousand browser tabs to be used for computation. We have implemented a command-line version of Pando that makes it easy to launch volunteer computing projects on the Web as part of a Unix processing pipeline. Volunteers join by simply opening a Web page. We successfully tested the tool on the Grid5000 testbed and provide all scripts and procedures necessary to replicate our experiments.