We’ve heard about the concept of utilizing browsers as distributed computing nodes for a couple years now. It’s only recently, with the race towards quicker JavaScript engines in browsers like Chrome that this concept seems useful. [Antimatter15] did a proof of idea JavaScript application for reversing hashes. Plura Processing utilizes a Java applet to do distributed processing. Today, [Ilya Grigorik] published an example utilizing MapReduce in JavaScript. Google’s MapReduce is created to support big dataset processing across computing clusters. It’s well fit for circumstances where computing nodes might go offline randomly (i.e. a browser navigates away from your site). He included a JavaScript snippet as well as a task server in Ruby. It will be fascinating to see if somebody comes up with a great utilize for this; you still requirement to persuade people to keep your page open in the browser though. We’re just saying: try to act shocked when you recognize Hack a Day is inexplicably making your processor spike…

[via Slashdot]