Cloud Computing - Harnessing the Client side power

A common vision of cloud computing is of massive data centers running in remote locations and clients utilizing the power over the network.
One aspect of the Cloud computing that I still believe is in infancy is in utilizing the client side computing power.
This team here  at MIT used a cluster of Nokia N900 smartphones to deploy a version of MapReduce called misco.
While there are challenges with reliability and network failure there are a lot of potential ways in which this could develop and I am going to indulge myself a bit in some fanciful thinking.
 The co location and GPS capabilities are fairly well developed in the telecom world. What if the smartphones within a particular network tower are able to automatically form a collaborative network?Wouldn't that lead to faster responses and quicker processing for a map reduce kind of  problems. We could be looking at self forming networks that could be used in disaster recovery efforts.
And what about within a private area like an office or a university campus? The availability of these client side devices are fairly predictable. You could expect these devices to be available during the working hours. The organization can potentially harness this additional capacity. This 'loosely coupled network' will require an intelligent design to manage  it effectively but it does open a lot of possibilities. While the processing power of Arm processors may not be much compared to Server processors they are quite powerful. And with ever increasing power on the client side who knows what this may lead up to?

World's Toughest Sudoku - Solved

Here's a solution to the 'World's Toughest Sudoku' puzzle that is doing the rounds of the news.

Not sure what the basis is for calling it the toughest sudoku puzzle but here is the solution.

Allow me to gloat over it :). Used my own excel sheet that I developed a little while ago. Took about an hour to solve it. Would be very tough to do it manually on a single sheet . The solution needs multiple iterations. Much easier to do conjectures using the computer as it's easy to rollback at any stage.

Is Cloud a throwback to the mainframe era?

A common refrain that we hear is that cloud computing is nothing new but a fall back to the centralized model of computing that existed in the seventies. After all Virtualization is a technology whose origin goes back to the mainframe days and languished while the desktop took sway.
I do believe that people are missing the point about the cloud by comparing it to the mainframe era. Yes it does mean more centralization of resource pools but there are some fundamental differences.
Mainframe computing was about efficient utilization of scarce resources. Everything from CPU, RAM , storage and network were expensive and the goal of the mainframe operating systems and the system administrators was to ensure that these resources were utilized to the maximum and that there was no wastage. The decision to use 2 bits to store the year and not 4 was purely driven by the fact that storage was extremely expensive.
Cloud Computing is more about getting more out of abundant resources. The cost of computing resources (except network bandwidth) has become really trivial and are hardly factors in the decision making process.
Amazon's EC2 was really about generating revenue from idle resources and ensuring that their vast computing resources get better utilized. We can get terabytes of storage available at cheap rates but a service like dropbox offers convenience and an easy way to manage your storage needs across machines.
Cloud computing is about gaining efficiency in managing the computing resources. So while the cost of processing power and storage has fallen exponentially the limiting factor is in managing these resources.
If you are looking to use dropbox do use my referral link as both of us can get an additional 250MB more that way.

Restarting My Posts

Ok Now that I have moved on from my job and have cleared my head on what I want to do (I think!) here's my first post after a long break. Plan to blog a lot more now and enjoy doing it.