Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 06:25:34 -0700 To: cypherpunks@toad.com From: Jay Campbell <edge@got.net> Subject: Re: idle CPU markets Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com

A graphic-arts chum of mine is really hyper about cycle sales - it will allow him to produce broadcast-quality commercials on a project-by-project basis without a huge initial hardware upgrade investment. Is anyone working on a Java libarary/demo/whatnot that allows plug-in algorithms, work completion 'fetch next batch' code, and some rudimentary authentication scheme? If not, I may tinker with this - if so, I'd like to chat :)

At USC/Information Sciences Institute, we are developing a system that will enable computer owners to sell or barter processor-cycles on the Internet. This is in some ways similar to what you talk about, in that it allows the execution of plug-in applications, and the policies for allocation and deallocation of remote resources are decided by the owners and are transparent to the end user. However, unlike Java, our applications are compiled C programs that execute on *compute servers* rather than on client machines. The application could in turn be an interpreter for some other language (e.g. Java). We also support parallel applications that use the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) libraries for interprocess communication. We have implemented a prototype known as the Prospero Resource Manager (PRM); a parallel version of POVRAY raytracing program is one of the applications we've run using PRM. We are currently working on integrating PRM with authentication and payment products (including kerberos, netcheque and netcash) developed as part of our other projects on security and electronic commerce. If you are interested in further information about any of these products, or are interested in participating in any aspect PRM's development we'd be happy to talk to you. More information is also available on our web pages: http://nii-server.isi.edu/info/prm and http://nii-server.isi.edu/gost-group. We also believe that one of the parallel applications for which PRM is useful is showing the weakness of certain encryption methods with limited key size. If anyone has suggestions for algorithms or software that might be included as a demo application in the next release of PRM, please contact me. Santosh Rao.