Does BOINC have any initiative to extend its grid computing into the web browser? Something similar to www.crowdprocess.com (no affiliation with me).

Would this be technically feasible? Letting users contribute via leaving open a web page?

Or letting website owners co-opt their users into contributing compute cycles? (with explicit permission, of course)

Thanks

This is the closest thing that I know of...

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=4154#26429

https://www.facebook.com/progressthruprocessors

People who join through Progress thru Processors go through a similar process to those who join CPDN via its Weather@Home subsection. They see BOINC projects promoted on a website eg Facebook, or in the press, and are invited to click on a link to go through the signing-up process. But they still have to download BOINC and will have a BOINC Manager whether they're aware of it or not.

I'm not too keen on this joining method unless it's only used for projects that have very robust tasks which can survive the computer owner having no idea what they're doing, taking no precautions to increase the tasks' chance of success, not knowing about the possibility of using forums as a means of asking for help, and indeed not knowing whether their tasks are completing or crashing.

In my view, joining through the BOINC website requires the new user to be slightly more conscious of what it all consists of. This must surely increase the chance of successful task processing.

Letting users contribute via leaving open a web page?

The original Skynet project worked like this. The web page loaded a Java application which crunched in the background. There was nothing to download, and you didn't even need to sign up if you didn't mind crunching anonymously.

Cheers,

Al.