WebCom: a Web based volunteer computer

The World Wide Web has become the largest single possible source of processing power. By coupling CPU time donated by volunteers, researchers and industry have the ability to execute applications that traditionally were in the domain of the supercomputer users. This paper presents one such attempt at creating a system capable of exploiting this abundance of processing power. It is based on an inherently parallel model of computing. The concepts behind computational model are explained and the implementation details are illustrated. The paper presents results obtained from various tests of this implementation.