Whenever you visit a Web page containing these applets, Java code is run securely on your computer. What makes applets secure is the restricted, self-contained environment in which their code runs. Pioneer runs tasks inside this same controlled environment. Yet, we've added even tighter restrictions and security mechanisms to this environment, making it the software equivalent of a steel vault. By design, the tasks that Pioneer retrieves from the server to run on your computer have no ability to interact with your data and programs whatsoever.
Pioneer verifies the integrity of a task before it can be executed on a computer.
Its security mechanism prohibits tasks from making any network connections except to the Frontier server. Because the Pioneer compute engine's tasks focus only on computations and are locked within this impenetrable barrier, running them is more secure than visiting a Web site. Since most tasks computed on Pioneer are optimized for a distributed computing environment, the software won't eat up your network bandwidth. A typical Pioneer task requires about 250KB and takes two hours to run on a 450MHz computer. You can use this communications outlet to reach employees with corporate communications directly at their desktops.