A peer-to-peer communication function among Web browsers for Web-based Volunteer Computing

As an accessible and high-performance computing environment, we have studied Web-based Volunteer Computing (VC), in which users can join a VC with just accessing a specified URL on Web browsers. A major problem of Web-based VC has been the difficulty of implementing some advanced functions such as direct communications among users and file sharing, because all processes must be handled onWeb browsers. For this problem, we propose a solution to realize a P2P communication function among Web browsers by using recent Web techniques such as Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) API and its library, PeerJS. As an useful application of our method, we demonstrate file sharing on Web browsers. Experimental result indicates that our method achieves almost 50% reduction in the total time of file distribution.