Silverlight Supercomputer

Dan Fay pointed to an interesting article on CodeProject about building a grid computing framework that runs on Silverlight. The proposition is really interesting. Imagine someone like the folding at home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) project providing and embeddable Silverlight widget that people can place on their sites to help speed genetic research... or how about a little widget on your page that takes some of the load off of your server to help offset high traffic volumes? Just imagine how many teraflops a site like MySpace could output on a given day. Google could potentially use something like this to index the web or calculate page ranks via MapReduce and eliminate a large chunk of their server farm.

Pretty interesting possibilities here... the question is, what are the ethics of "stealing" bandwidth and CPU cycles from viewers?

1 Comment

  • Coincidentally(?) I was at a BarCamp in Los Angeles a few weeks ago where somebody proposed doing the same thing to perform distributed grid encryption cracking. I guess it's clear which side of the ethics debate that person came down on :)

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