Smidge Enables Parallel Processing Just by Pointing to a Web Site

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Image a distributed supercomputer code that doesn’t need to installed, but rather lets you pool the processing power of potentially thousands of machines just by pointing them to a single website. Called Smidge, the code is kind of ad hoc supercomputer built with JavaScript, the standard programming language of the web.

We were able to scale it across every device in the building, including everyone’s laptop, iPhone, Android phone. Even my BlackBerry ran it, which surprised me,” said Ruan Pethiyagoda. “By inserting a bit of JavaScript into a webpage, a site owner could distribute a problem amongst all the site’s visitors. Visitors’ computers or phones would be running calculations in the background while they read a page. With enough visitors, he says, a site could farm out enough small calculations to solve some difficult problems.”

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