SEMINAR: Physics Seminar

The insatiable appetite for computing power worldwide finds many enterprises scaling out horizontally using an increasingly mature set of software tools and cloud computing facilities. But what about the majority of users who have limited finances with which to tackle increasingly challenging problems? The over 1.2 billion desktop computers in the world represent computing power 200 times that of the top 500 supercomputers combined, and Nereus-V technology is the first credible candidate to make these available for productive use by leveraging the ubiquity, security and portability of the Java platform. Nereus-V enables researchers to run their code on a donor's desktop PC inside the secure sandbox of a standard Java Applet. The donor joins the Nereus-V network by simply clicking a link in their browser, thereby allowing their idle CPU time to become part of a pool of computing resources. Research code is then distributed to this pool and executed within a standardised environment - leaving the project team to spend time on results rather than supporting a myriad of different hardware/software configurations. With billions of Java enabled browsers in the world, no separate client software needed, and no elevated privileges required, the Nereus-V system represents the simplest and most widely available mechanism to capture spare cycles for productive use. This talk will describe NereusV, including live demonstrations, and will outline examples of its use in Astrophysics (similar to SETI@Home), Financial Modelling and Medical Imaging. The partner project, JPC (pure Java x86 emulator), will also be discussed as the means to run unmodified x86 code still inside the NereusV Java-only security sandbox.