Wild ideas connected together - Google: go for it!
I had an interesting day today. I spent some time on hacking on
technologies I do no longer use for various reasons but I was still
able to get up to speed with them very fast. Dreaming about their
potential use cases for today's world, I had an idea (there are many
people allergic to these words from me, because it often means a lot of
work for them 8). I would like to know your comments ;-)
First some premises.
Imagine IBM's
Deep
Blue machine - one massively parallel machine. It is a
supercomputer playing chess. Very fast computer...
Imagine Google and many people using it for googling^Wsearching. Many
people spend a small time on Google pages. They do not pay for this
service, but Google is using their CPUs to render his search results
wanted by them on their monitors using their electricity etc.
Google is using a lot of CPU power. Some people already mentioned it
-
Black
Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year.
What if Google uses a bit more CPU power than it needs? Can it use
this CPU power a bit more than you need for rendering your search
results?
And now some wild ideas :-) Imagine Google adding a small AJAX code to
their pages. Code like this (metacode):
- after the page is rendered, talk to
supermassivelyparalleltasks.google.com and ask for a job
- when you received it, start it
- when it is finished, submit the results back to Google
I can imagine "jobs" like this: "evaluate the current position on the
chessboard" or "evaluate the positions from this state two moves
deeper" or "SETI@Google" etc. Massively parallelized!
Of course there can be many similar examples and ideas around it -
users could define on what they want to work on (SETI, DNA, PI digits,
prime numbers) in their configuration and how much CPU time they want
to DONATE to Google/these projects etc.
etc. etc.
Maybe this is old news, old concept, but it can be used by everyone -
e.g. imagine having a AJAX job on your homepage and people visiting
your pages working for you
on
Eternity
II.
What do you think about it? Is this concept already in use in the
wild? Can it be used to save the world? 8)