Awhile back Nikita Ivanov (gridgain) did a couple of posts on creating compute clouds out of Android mobile devices. Like most compute-oriented grid guys before him, he views just about any cloud as a source of cycles. After all, what choice do you have when all you can do is schedule fairly chunky work, without much assurance of when and where it'll execute?
Alex Miller (Terracotta) observed (as did I) that probably wasn't enough ... sure it would be cool at first blush, but what would we really gain? Just cycles? And?
After all, these cycles will be small, lossy and unpredictable, separated by high latency and relatively limited pipes ... but other than that they're fine!
The One Place It Does Make Sense
Here's one for Nikita ... he was able to get Olga Kharif's attention in her BusinessWeek piece on applications for Android. Seems like the notion of "free supercomputers" has enduring appeal - think Seti, United Devices, and so on - good science experiments, but not too much beyond that.
The Good Stuff
Having said all that, I do think that there'll be a point for Android clouds - maybe even a BIG POINT.
Think of applications where physical location is an intrinsic part of the app (such as at sporting events, concerts, or perhaps on the battlefield), or where distributed state dominates (particularly if the actual manipulation can be directed to portions of the cloud nearby the state itself - hopefully even the same machine).
I think that key to these will be the ability to reliably maintain distributed state, handle time-sensitive events predictably, and do all of that with lossy compute elements connected via unreliable, modest-bandwidth interconnects.
I'm Not the Only One
Inspired by his latest read, Alex is thinking about more Android apps as well:
They just aren’t the kinds of compute-intensive HPC apps that grid vendors focus on. I think there is a lot of interesting territory here and it seems likely to me that location-aware and environment-aware distributed computing apps are going to be ever more prevalent in the future as the devices become ubiquitous and standards emerge.
Exactly.
