Professor Promises Personal Supercomputers to Extend Power of Smartphones

Just as many in the computer industry have been sounding the death knell for the lowly desktop computer, associate professor at Virginia Tech Wu Feng, publishes a paper on the school tech site, promising personal supercomputers for the masses. Instead of Smartphones doing away with the personal computer, he sees them as nodes connected to a personal supercomputer back home that can do some serious number crunching.

Feng, according to Wired magazine, is known for creating small personalized supercomputers, and has now made one that is in the price range of a small business, and is powerful enough to compete with the super-severs that are now used for cloud computing. Thus, he wonders, why bother with the cloud when you can have your own super-server sitting in your basement?

Feng's novel approach to supercomputing also includes reduced electrical consumption; he famously built a supercomputer several years ago that required no more power than a couple of hair driers.

It's not difficult to imagine networks of home supercomputers strung together, adding to the power and ultimately to the applications that users could run. Imagine for example, having your home based supercomputer run the shortest path algorithm and returning the answer to you on your Smartphone as you're traveling. The shortest path algorithm, also known as the traveling salesmen algorithm in computer science circles, is one of the most CPU intensive applications known to science. Thus, having such an app available on demand while driving to some unknown destination would demonstrate the power available to people, whether at home tied directly to their own supercomputer or retrieving answers via Smartphone or iPad.

Consider one current Smartphone app, Siri that allows users to ask their Smartphone questions with human like phrasing. Currently, the app houses its stored database of information on Apple's super-servers. While certainly convenient, it doesn't really allow the app to grow with the owner, particularly if the owner of the iPhone changes phones. Now imagine if the entire app was situated on a home supercomputer. Over time, it would learn the nuances of the particular person, growing ever better at interpreting what the iPhone user wants when asking questions. Plus, because it would be based on their own home based computer, the things that it learns would translate to not just one user on one phone, but to all member of the family regardless of whether they are using their phones, iPads, or laptops. And, better yet, all that information would be private, unlike the way it is now when everything a user's Smartphone learns is stored on a host computer.

In short, the introduction of a home or business based supercomputer would likely revolutionize the ways that computers and Smartphones are used.