Gray Computing: An Analysis of Computing with Background JavaScript Tasks

Websites routinely distribute small amounts of work to visitors´ browsers in order to validate forms, render animations, and perform other computations. This paper examines the feasibility, cost effectiveness, and approaches for increasing the workloads offloaded to web visitors´ browsers in order to turn them into a large-scale distributed data processing engine, which we term gray computing. Past research has looked primarily at either non-browser based volunteer computing or browser-based volunteer computing where the visitors keep their browsers open to a single web page for a long period of time. This paper provides a deep analysis of the architectural, cost effectiveness, user experience, performance, security, and other issues of gray computing distributed data processing engines with high heterogeneity, non-uniform page view times, and high computing pool volatility.