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?
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