Your washing machine - part of the next grid
This month's Wired magazine (May 2007) has a one page story that really caught my eye. On page 62 is an article called "Power House" where the author dissects the gear in a modern home and aggregates the processing power contained within said home. The list of equipment that they cite, which is, to be honest, more than most homes have, contains an aggregate of 31,670 MIPS! Some are obvious such as the XBox 360 @ 21,000 MIPS but some are less obvious, such as your washer, refrigerator and vacuum at 60 MIPS each.
This article reminded me of discussions we were having at Sun back in the mid 90's. One of the things were exploring is how to take the idle cycles in the typical office, from idle desktops to desktop phones, and use these compute resources for distributed computing. Of course, this concept is not new and projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home do this in a targeted manner.
Sony has talked about doing this through network connected CELL based devices that a user may own and Microsoft has even filed a patent (US Patent Application #20070087830) to connect devices to each other, and across the network, to use their aggregate processing power for game applications. Don't know how they will get this one approved as it is so broad and general, and builds on the same concepts the computer industry has been forwarding for years, but we'll see where this one goes....
Interesting story about Microsoft's pursuit of cross device game services. Back in the Summer of 2003, I gave a talk at an executive level summit on the future of interactive games and entertainment. In this presentation, I laid out the case for extending the gameplay experience beyond just a console or fixed point device and aggregate gameplay across devices ranging from mobile to desktop. After the talk, I was met in the crowd by a guy named J Allard. We made our introductions and he said to me, "You know, I have read your interviews online and what you are talking about and I think you've got it right. And it's something we are going to do." 'Live Anywhere' anyone?
This article reminded me of discussions we were having at Sun back in the mid 90's. One of the things were exploring is how to take the idle cycles in the typical office, from idle desktops to desktop phones, and use these compute resources for distributed computing. Of course, this concept is not new and projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home do this in a targeted manner.
Sony has talked about doing this through network connected CELL based devices that a user may own and Microsoft has even filed a patent (US Patent Application #20070087830) to connect devices to each other, and across the network, to use their aggregate processing power for game applications. Don't know how they will get this one approved as it is so broad and general, and builds on the same concepts the computer industry has been forwarding for years, but we'll see where this one goes....
Interesting story about Microsoft's pursuit of cross device game services. Back in the Summer of 2003, I gave a talk at an executive level summit on the future of interactive games and entertainment. In this presentation, I laid out the case for extending the gameplay experience beyond just a console or fixed point device and aggregate gameplay across devices ranging from mobile to desktop. After the talk, I was met in the crowd by a guy named J Allard. We made our introductions and he said to me, "You know, I have read your interviews online and what you are talking about and I think you've got it right. And it's something we are going to do." 'Live Anywhere' anyone?
