Wed Aug 8 23:05:51 CEST 2007

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):
  1. after the page is rendered, talk to supermassivelyparalleltasks.google.com and ask for a job
  2. when you received it, start it
  3. 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)

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: Lost in Thoughts, Internet technologies