Did you know our phones processing power is going to waste in our pockets? I didn’t so why not link lots of them together and solve some problems?
Smartphone owners carry around more processing power in their pocket than an old fashion computer, but most of the time it not used. That could now change thanks to a plan to combine the unused potential of groups of nearby phones, creating clusters capable of everything from weather modelling to Wi-Fi cracking.
Cluster computing is not a new idea, having found success on desktop computers with projects like SETI@home, which uses idle PCs to search for signs of alien life. It still has to take off in smartphones, however, because of their poor battery life. That shouldn’t be a problem when phones are being charged, they discovered at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany.
They joined six low-powered Android phones into a network. Each can carry out 5.8 million calculations per second, or megaflops. When connected via Wi-Fi the phones could carry out a combined 26.2 megaflops, about 75 per cent of the theoretical maximum. Connecting the phones together via USB upped this to 29 megaflops.
These numbers, first presented at a computing conference in Macau, China, in June, are low – around a thousandth of the processing power of a modern desktop computer – but suggest that larger smartphone clusters could be useful. Current high-end smartphones are capable of nearly 100 megaflops on their own and are constantly improving.
The system would be most useful when there are large groups of phones charging at the same time. Imagine boarding a train, for example, and plugging in your phone, along with hundreds of other passengers. Connecting everyone’s phones via the on-board Wi-Fi could allow the train to calculate an extremely detailed local weather forecast using environmental sensor data from the destination, letting you know whether it will be raining when you arrive. Or hacking flash-mobs could team up to try to crack the encryption on a nearby Wi-Fi network.
It could be another way to bring phone users together. It’s a way of further extending the social aspect of events, beyond just Facebook and Twitter. The more people show up, the more computer power you potentially have available.
