I was reading the above titled article in the May 2015 issue of Scientific American magazine. Suddenly I thought about the SETI At Home Project of more than a decade ago. This system is a distributed computing system where small pieces of a very large data set are sent to many thousands of computers around the world to be processed and sent back.
My thoughts were about the percentage of processing power being used at any time by the millions of personal computers around the world. My guess is that less than 25 percent of the processing power is used on average. Therefore more than 75 percent is unused and being wasted. The actual amount used may be much less, possibly only a few percent, and even more CPU may be available.
This vast amount of processing power could be put to use, as it was with the SETI At Home project. There are some technical challenges that have to be overcome, especially in the area of security. But if a very large amount of processing power is distributed over a large amount of PCs, and can be harnessed to do a particular job, then there may be no need for larger, faster PCs.
This reminds me of Heinlein’s ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’, where all the computers on the moon joined together and became sentient. It’s a very interesting book.
Update 2015-06-30 – The news said that a hacker has been caught by the FTC for putting malware into smartphone apps. This malware turns the phone into a slave processor to ‘mine’ a digital currency called Dogecoin. With thousands of slave phones, the hacker has a supercomputer at his command.
