Really interesting that your submission has to be in the form of something that can run on Native Client. I wonder if they're using this to stress-test implementations of NC.
It's almost certainly this, and I would love to see them release lightweight grid software that uses NaCl on compute hosts. The footprints of existing grid software stacks, both in terms of volume of software and sysadmin time to setup/maintain, are ridiculous.
I and another computer science student spent an entire semester internship just trying to get Globus properly installed and configured in the CS lab for one of our professors. It (the cluster computing software infrastructure of Globus) was a ridiculous sprawling mess of poorly integrated components. I've gone through both Gentoo and Linux-From-Scratch and can honestly say it is easier to assemle the parts for an entire operating system than to get Globus working (at least that was the case in 2008). I could see a definite need for a lightweight solution with a simple install package, but I wasn't in the position to write one.
I was looking at the facebook github page for hiphop php and I only just made the connection that the compiled php projects could potentially be ran via "nativeclient".
Equally, its interesting to read that you can register a nativeclient as a plugin for Chrome to be used in their speech api. Not for speech per say, it demonstrates that the connection and the code exists to make it easier to hook into other aspects.
"Extensions are free to use any available web technology to provide speech, including streaming audio from a server, HTML5 audio, Native Client"
