Performance of an infrastructure for worldwide parallel computing

The millions of Java-capable computers on the Internet provide the hardware needed for a national and international computing infrastructure, a virtual parallel computer that can be tapped for many uses. To date, however, little is known about the cost and feasibility of building and maintaining such global, large scale structures. In this work, we evaluate the performance of a Java/WWW-based infrastructure to gain insights into the feasibility and projected cost of initializing and maintaining wide-area hierarchies that contain up to one million nodes.