"Clone cloud"

Via a dude at my work, a pretty neat article about how Intel is taking cloud computing to another level--by running a clone of your mobile device in the cloud:

When you ask your handheld to perform a computational task that would benefit from more horsepower, the device and the cloud could negotiate at run-time to determine how best to satisfy your request. If the cloud can help, it will - delivering the results back to your handheld.

Of course, offloading computationally expensive operations from clients to hosts is not new. The Clone Cloud is different, however, in that the client/host relationship dissolves into the cloud. The smartphone isn't getting data from an application running in the cloud. The smartphone itself is running in the cloud in clone form.

The cloud, by the way, doesn't have to live on big iron in a data center. The Clone Cloud concept is designed to scale down to a point where the host could be your laptop or desktop machine.

To demonstrate the power of the Clone Cloud, Chun ran an image-processing task that took a minute and a half on a smartphone. On the smartphone's clone, the same task took a second and a half - including the transmission time - and the process was seamless. To the user, it simply looked like one hella-fast smartphone.

A couple of things. First, I think the idea of the "cloud" consisting of just your own hardware--your desktop, for instance--is pretty dang neat. I like the idea that consumers will just buy computing power in the abstract--in the form of a desktop, say--and that everything else we have will draw from this pool of computing power.

Second, I was surprised to see "hella" in the article (the author hails from SF), especially since this is an article written for the UK Register. Are people over there savvy enough to recognize the term? It seems like even a lot of people in Southern California don't know it.

(Photo by MikeLove)