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Parallel Computing

A central design goal of Muq is to break down the walls separating processes and servers, so as to truly make the Internet a World Without Walls.

The current focus has been on applying this network transparency to facilitate human interaction, with one to many users per server, but another way of applying it would be to facilitate use of many servers by one user.

The many servers could be either a local Beowulf-style cluster, or could be a WAN-separated set of machines, perhaps donating spare cycles to some large computation.

Doing this would require writing some infrastructure to implement a central job queue from which individual servers pull individual tasks and to which they return their results, along with control software to display and modify the state of the computation.

Rendering ray-traced animations on the cheap would be one obvious application of such a Muq-based parallel computing engine.

One can envision a Grassroot Compute Server project in which Muq servers volunteer idle cycles, and in return get a vote in which projects get approved for execution, in proportion to the compute cycles donated.


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