What if the Web became the largest distributed computing network ever built? The Joshfire technical team created a prototype of a chess game for which the artificial intelligence algorithm is distributed across all computers browsing a website. With this technology, each user browsing the website joins a “Web-distributed grid computer.” This prototype illustrates the concept of Web-Grid, which tomorrow may offer tremendous computing capabilities across the planet. Chess@home is available on http://chessathome.org.

UPDATE: Tue Sept 6th, Joshfire wins the competition Node Knockout in the category “Completeness”. It’s a real satisfaction for the French team to receive this recognition from his peers: mainly companies from the Silicon Valley and judges who are coming from the staff of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla, Dropbox, Sequoia Capital, Twitter, Adobe…

From SETI@Home to the Web-Grid

SETI@Home was created in 1999 and became the best known distributed computing network of the Internet age. The system was designed to use millions of computers connected to the network to analyze signals from possible extraterrestrial intelligence. Although the project experienced funding issues in 2011, the implementation of this supercomputer distributed across the entire internet still remains a remarkable achievement.

One of the main concerns about the SETI@home platform is the fact that it needs the installation of a specific program on local computers. More than 9 million people have downloaded the software to help the computing capacity of the SETI mainframe. The average capacity was evaluated in 2009 to 1.7 million personal computers… However, this figure is low compared to today’s traffic over the Web. Indeed, imagine sites like Facebook and Google involved in a distributed computing program. Imagine them using each computer connected to the different pages of their website to create what could be a huge “Web-distributed computing platform”: a Web-Grid! Each computer connected to a Facebook or Google page would give x percent of its computing time to the web-grid during a browsing session… Such a system would easily solve scientific equations on a global scale and at lower cost for all of us.

Creating a Web-Grid requires that the local resource supplying to global computing power is drawn transparently by simply browsing a Web page (of course by warning the user too). Using Javascript, the Joshfire team created the Chess@home prototype for the 2011 NodeKnockout contest. In only one week, the team has already registered peaks of around 500 computers simultaneously contributing to the platform. Our CTO Sylvain has made a technical overview of Chess@home on his blog.

Help us break a world record

The project’s goal is to exceed a current world record by reaching 2071 computers simultaneously working on one game… To do so we only need few websites with large traffic to be associated to the operation. It’s simple : they only have to include a small code to their web page. This code is available the Chess@home website: http://chessathome.org.

Help us break the record by spreading this on social networks! Thanks in advance.