Economical supercomputing thru Smartphone Crowd Computing

Editor's Notes

• #4: Desktop Grid Computing has been considered as an inexpensive alternative of the highly-priced supercomputers. The popularity of desktops as computing devices is fading quickly in the age of powerful smartphones. Today’s smartphones can deliver equivalent or even better performance than supercomputers of yesteryears. The computing power of potentially equivalent to a modern supercomputer can be attained by properly utilizing collective processing powers of these potent smartphones.
• #5: SMP – each core share workloads, run at a lower frequency which in turn results in less power consumption HMP - CPUs comprise of two different sets of cores. The aim is to use ‘LITTLE’ cores for most of the time and use the ‘big’ cores only for high-frequency operations. significant average power savings without compromising the peak performance. GPU Accelerated Computing - compute-intensive segment of the application is passed on to the GPU; however, rest of the code is executed on the CPU. GPU-accelerated computing can deliver exceptional performance if the right process is scheduled to the right core. SoC has made it materialize to put a whole computer on a chip and reduced the size to a thumbnail.
• #6: SMP – each core share workloads, run at a lower frequency which in turn results in less power consumption HMP - CPUs comprise of two different sets of cores. The aim is to use ‘LITTLE’ cores for most of the time and use the ‘big’ cores only for high-frequency operations. significant average power savings without compromising the peak performance. GPU Accelerated Computing - compute-intensive segment of the application is passed on to the GPU, rest of the code is executed on the CPU. GPU-accelerated computing can deliver exceptional performance if the right process is scheduled to the right core. SoC has enabled to put a whole computer on a chip and reduced the size to a thumbnail.
• #7: 1. The Asia-Pacific region, especially China and India will have the maximum number of smartphone users in coming years. 2. eMarketer, a global marketing research and intelligence firm, estimates that by 2019, 51.5 percent (roughly 1.5 billion) of the mobile population in this region will have smartphones [24]. 3. In coming years, smartphone usage is expected to be highest in India, among all Asia-Pacific countries. 4. The primary reason behind the explode in smartphone market in India is the penetration of indigenous low-cost smartphone makers like Micromax, Carbon, Intex etc. along with cheap but potent Chinese products.
• #8: 1. The Asia-Pacific region, especially China and India will have the maximum number of smartphone users in coming years. 2. eMarketer, a global marketing research and intelligence firm, estimates that by 2019, 51.5 percent (roughly 1.5 billion) of the mobile population in this region will have smartphones [24]. 3. In coming years, smartphone usage is expected to be highest in India, among all Asia-Pacific countries. 4. The primary reason behind the explode in smartphone market in India is the penetration of indigenous low-cost smartphone makers like Micromax, Carbon, Intex etc. along with cheap but potent Chinese products.
• #9: 1. People use their smartphones generally for very few hours in a day [28][29], which accounts a large number of unused smartphones at a certain point of time. 2. If, say, 60 or more smartphones with GFLOPS higher than 500 (e.g. Imagination PowerVRGT7900 or NVIDIA Tegra) are connected together, the combined GFLOPS can be well equivalent to some of the India’s top 30 supercomputers [8],minus the huge cost. If the number of such smartphones is increased to 100 or more, the accumulated performance can challenge some of the mighty supercomputers in the world [30].
• #15: 1. Desktop Grid Computing offers a perfect cheap alternative. 2. The popularity of desktops is decreasing; instead, smartphones are becoming primary computing device to people thanks to extensive advancement in their computing ability. 3. Smartphone Crowd Computing (SCC) can aptly take the place of Desktop Grid Computing as the inexpensive alternative of costly supercomputers.