Mininova tried this [1] and got something like ~1000 MIPS out of it. That was using Firefox 1.5 though, running their IPS counter on Chromium dev on a modern Core2 duo gives me 71428571 IPS, more than a 30x improvement over the per-user numbers they cite.<p>Back of the envelope math: ceteris paribus that would put a 3-million pageviews/day somewhere along the lines of a dual-Itanium box today. Facebook pushes ~500 million pageviews so has access to ~300 CPUs worth of computing power in the form of its visitors' javascript engines (~5,600,000 MIPS).<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.mininova.org/articles/2005/11/17/mininova-the-javascript-cluster/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mininova.org/articles/2005/11/17/mininova-the-ja...</a>
I detest anyone who would try to sap my spare computing resources without first informing me. With consent and full disclosure, however, I would likely participate in such a system.
I've always thought this sort of thing would make for an interesting way for publishers of websites to monetize their traffic. Instead of showing ads, a publisher could make it so each page view meant a small unit of work was completed.<p>A company could do business like an ad network, but instead of matching advertisers with publishers and serving ads, it would match groups needing computing resources with publishers and handle everything involved with serving out units of work and collecting the results.
I like the idea, although it limits the kind of "fitness evaluations" that one can carry out.<p>For instance, you aren't going to be compiling and running c-programs client side... <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084015" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084015</a>