Aura: Harnessing the Power of IoT Devices For Distributed Computing

An anonymous reader points out that a computer science research team from the University of Alabama has put together a new architecture called "Aura," which lets people make use of excess computing power from various smart devices scattered throughout their homes. Ragib Hasan, the team's leader, says this scheme could be integrated with smartphones, letting you offload CPU-intensive tasks to your home devices. He also anticipates the ability to sell off excess capacity — like how people with solar panels can sometimes sell the excess energy they harvest. Alternately, they could be allocated to a distributed computing project of the homeowner's choice, like Seti@home. Of course, several obstacles need to be solved before a system like Aura can be used — smart devices run on a variety of operating systems and often communicate only through a narrow set of protocols. Any unifying effort would also need careful thought about security and privacy matters.

Comments

Cycles are too cheap

[mspohr]

The "problem" is that even cheap phone processors have far more processing power than needed. Anything that requires real processing power already is offloaded to the net. There is no need to scavenge cycles from other processors.
I have a bunch of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi processors doing a bunch of stuff (mostly collecting data) and they all are overkill for the task at hand. They mostly send data to servers and/or retrieve massaged data for presentation. I can't imagine any of these processors ever becoming overloaded and needing assistance.