Google Chrome: Spreading Computations Over Many Browsers (or Computers)

I had a crazy idea the other day when I was reading a Javascript book and trying to review my Javascript knowledge, which is way out of date if you ask me. Ajax and web apps didn't exist a few years back, so it didn't occur to me back then, but when I came across a lesson about setInterval and setTimeout, I suddenly had an idea. I think it's really possible although I am not really sure yet, but what if we have a server out there, that talks to our browsers using Ajax, and tell our browsers to do computations and send the result back to the server ?

I began to do a little bit experiment by writing a code to increment a variable from 1 until 1000 by Javascript that you can download from codepad.org. Unfortunately, I was a little bit disappointed since the code runs very slow on Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.2, Safari 3.0, and IE 7.0, all the popular browsers today. Okay, so I realized that maybe it was just a dream.

But, since Google Chrome made its beta debut a few days ago, that dream began to sprout again. The code is much much faster in Chrome than in the other browsers although is still far behind from the speed that can actually be performed by my computer. Then again, Google Chrome is still at its beta stage, and my instinct tells me that there is perhaps a setting somewhere that is limiting the maximum speed of Javascript in Chrome. It is reasonable though since most of the time, you don't want to have a webpage (such as my code up there) eating up a lot of your computer resources.

So, instead of doing the computation process somewhere else, my idea actually works the other way around by doing the computation process on our computers and let the server collects the results from the many computers that it connects to. I am wondering if the term: cloud computing, also applies, btw. This will also allow us, common people, to build our own local network system, and divide the computation process to each PC that we can get, by using browsers (only !).

I just can imagine that in the future, there will be an ad, for example by NASA, that says "We terribly need a lot of computation process to perform a life simulation on planet X, and we are grateful if you can spare your computer's idle time to help us by visiting this URL", and we are talking about all computers on Earth here ! This is all theoretical, I know, but I think it is highly possible.

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