An applet‐based anonymous distributed computing system

Anonymous distributed computing systems consist of potentially millions of heterogeneous processing nodes connected by the global Internet. These nodes can be administered by thousands of organizations and individuals, with no direct knowledge of each other. This work defines anonymous distributed computing systems in general then focuses on the specifics of an applet‐based approach for large‐scale, anonymous, distributed computing on the Internet. A user wishing to participate in a computation connects to a distribution server, which provides information about available computations, and then connects to a computation server with a computation to distribute. A Java class is downloaded, which communicates with the computation server to obtain data, performs the computation, and returns the result. Since any computer on the Internet can participate in these computations, potentially a large number of computers can participate in a single computation.