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Cool Ideas for Mobile Applications or Clusters?

Posted by Cliff on from the fun-with-brainstorming dept.

kernel2 asks: "I'm currently doing my MSc. degree here at the University of Westminster in London and I need some ideas for my upcoming masters thesis. I'm mostly interested in the areas of clusters, agents, mobile applications, or any cool ideas you guys may have in the area of networking. The idea in the end is to come up with some cool topic and implementing it by either adding to existing software or writing something from scratch. For example, is there something that irks you about the way Beowulf or Mosix clusters work? Something you wish your WAP-enabled mobile could do that it currently can't? I've had an idea about an agent that automatically takes care of transferring files and synchronizing them for you in the background. It would automatically determine the best network to use to transfer the files and would know where to store the results. Has anything like this been done? Does it sound interesting and is there anything cooler that this could do? Any ideas? "

4 comments

  1. How about... by Betcour · · Score: 2

    A mobile cluster ? Harnessing the power of millions of WAP cell-phones with distributed-low bandwidth computations ?

    Think about it : your Nokia 7110 cracking RC5 keys for the distributed.net cracking contest :)

    1. Re:How about... by CvD · · Score: 1

      Well, even though the idea sounds cool, this is exactly what you wouldn't want on your mobile device. The devices have already been optimized to use as little power when they're not being actively used, and running a process that takes 100% cpu time will drain your batteries mighty fast. So, leave key cracking to units connected to the power grid. :-)

      Cheers!

      Costyn.

      --
      The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
  2. How about by bgalehouse · · Score: 1

    Build a distributed fileshare in which each node uses it's neighbors as caches/redistribution point. Initially worry about automatic mirroring, then add support for file locks and such.

    Besides a better distributed filesystem, this could also be seen as a napster/gnutella next generation. Go heavy on the fault tolerance and decentralization.

  3. A Free Exchange? by costas · · Score: 2

    I think one of the biggest missing links in the Free Software/Open Source world is a competitor to Exchange/Lotus Notes. IMAP and LDAP are a start, but we need a way to sync files, calendars, contacts, etc. I think both the GNOME and KDE people are working on something like that, so maybe finishing up a module will be enough (say file syncing).

    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.