Technology

The GridBee Web Computing Framework enables developers to distribute the workload of their computing projects to HTML5 compliant browsers.

The framework supports the execution of JavaScript and Native Client workunits, latter being available only on Google Chrome with NaCl enabled. Our initial tests confirmed that running compute-intensive applications in JavaScript is a viable option and provides the best interoperability among different browsers. Using Native Client restricts you to Chrome but it offers more features and makes porting already existing native applications much easier.

The GridBee Framework is a JavaScript library that handles user interactions and manages the communication between the browser and BOINC servers. According to user settings it downloads and executes workunits and uploads their results. The framework can connect to multiple workunit servers, and thanks to it’s modular structure it can be extended to communicate with non-BOINC servers.

The framework is being developed in HaXe, a strong typed language with compile time validation and high level functions. You can download the source from its GitHub project site. The framework can be used to create BOINC like client programs or can be integrated into any website to execute volunteer computing tasks in the background. The Web Computing project has a particular interest in BOINC and maintains the framework’s BOINC module.