The idea of using web browsers are some sort of compute nodes in a distributed system has been kicking around for ages (I should know, I implemented one for my

The idea of using web browsers are some sort of compute nodes in a distributed system has been kicking around for ages (I should know, I implemented one for my honours thesis almost eight years ago!). The trouble with it is the limited type of work that it's actually useful for. For one, latency is a killer (we're talking people's home/work computer being used here) which means it'll only really work on embarrasingly-parallel problems, and secondly the inherent unreliability of the nodes themselves: a MapRejiuce computation will be terminated as soon as the user closes their browser window/tab. Unless it has some serious checkpointing or some other fault tolerance mechanism then I fear it'll remain, like all the similar systems that came before, better in theory than in practice.