Cooperative task-oriented computing

the long version

Cooperative network supercomputing is becoming increasingly popular for harnessing the power of the global Internet computing platform. A typical Internet supercomputer consists of a master computer or server and a large number of computers called workers, performing computation on behalf of the master. Despite the simplicity and benefits of a single master approach, as the scale of such computing environments grows, it becomes unrealistic to assume the existence of the infallible master that is able to coordinate the activities of multitudes of workers. Large-scale distributed systems are inherently dynamic and are subject to perturbations, such as failures of computers and network links, thus it is also necessary to consider fully distributed peer-to-peer solutions.