A Volunteer Computing Architecture for Computational Workflows on Decentralized Web

Abstract

The amount of accessible computational devices over the Internet offers an enormous but latent computational power. Nonetheless, the complexity of orchestrating and managing such devices requires dedicated architectures and tools and hinders the exploitation of this vast processing capacity. Over the last years, the paradigm of (Browser-based) Volunteer Computing emerged as a unique approach to harnessing such computational capabilities, leveraging the idea of voluntarily offering resources. This article proposes VFuse, a groundbreaking architecture to exploit the Browser-based Volunteer Computing paradigm via a ready-to-access volunteer network. VFuse offers a modern multi-language programming environment for developing scientific workflows usingWebAssembly technology without requiring the user any local installation or configuration. We equipped our architecture with a secure and transparent rewarding mechanism based on blockchain technology (Ethereum) and distributed P2P file system (IPFS). Further, the use of Non-Fungible Tokens provides a unique, secure, and transparent methodology for recognizing the users’ participation in the network.We developed a prototype of the proposed architecture and four example applications implemented with our system. All code and examples are publicly available on GitHub.