Distributed Computing, the exploitation of idle cycles on pervasive desktop PC systems offers the opportunity to increase the available computing power by orders of magnitude (10x - 1000x). However, for desktop PC distributed computing to be widely accepted within the enterprise, the systems much achieve high levels of robustness, security, scalability, unobtrusiveness, and manageability. We describe the Entropia Distributed Computing System, as a case study, detailing its internal architecture and philosophy in attacking these key problems. In particular, key aspects of the Entropia system include the use of: 1) scalable web/database technology for system management, 2) network tunneling and application namespaces for logical connectivity, 3) binary sandboxing technology for security and unobtrusiveness, and 4) open integration model to allow applications from many sources to be incorporated. These technologies are combined to produce a robust, flexible, high performance system which...
Andrew A. Chien