Harnessing the power in your pocket
Joseph Spitzer, Kate Lockwood, Jason Sawin · Computer Science and Software Engineering · 2015
In the mid-90s when personal computers became common, organizations began to consider ways to harness the power of underutilized processor cycles. One of the most prominent of these efforts, [email protected], recruited volunteers to donate their unused processor cycles. These spare cycles are used to analyze radio telescope data, work that would have previously been done on special-purpose clusters. Now, individuals carry smartphones with processing capabilities that far outstrip those of a mid-90s desktop. At the same time, the amount of business data being collected is growing exponentially and corporations are scrambling to find the computing resources necessary to process it. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of utilizing unused cycles on employee company-issued mobile devices, much like [email protected] did with personal computers, to process business intelligence data.