The Snowflakes Distributed Computing System

In the last decade, personal computers became more powerful and less expensive, and the development of Internet increased the connectivity of these machines. This situation opened many opportunities in the distributed computing world. Some projects such as SETI@home were launched to perform scientific computations on temporarily unused workstations. However, in most cases, the distributed computing software installed on the workstations could only execute predetermined applications. It was necessary to update the software to enable it to execute new applications. In this paper we present Snowflakes, a distributed computing software designed to download and execute arbitrary applications automatically. Like SETI@home, Snowflakes provides a screen saver that can be installed on the workstations of a laboratory to harness their computing power without disrupting the work of the users. We considered carefully the issues of security and ease of use. The applications distributed are authenticated and sandboxed to prevent accidental or malicious damage to the user machines. The software itself is easy to install and easy to configure with its graphical user interfaces. Moreover, Snowflakes features a simple API that enables a programmer to develop new applications rapidly.