Hypertasking: From Information Web to Computing Utility

John McCarthy proposed the vision of utility computing in 1961. Barbara Liskov proposed a related vision of abstraction-powered Internet Computer in 2009. This position paper outlines a distributed computing model towards realizing the McCarthy-Liskov vision. This “hypertasking” model aims at extending the “hypermedia” model of the World Wide Web into a model of World Wide Computing Utility, turning an information web into a computing web. The hypertasking model contains three abstractions, including global resource space, stored-computer architecture, and monadic hypermedia. A prototype architecture and experimental evidence are presented to support this perspective.