A Global Computer? Oct 97

Recently someone in the U.S. suggested that, if all Americans had electric cars, there would be enough power in them to supply a large part of the country’s power requirements. They could be hooked into the national grid while they were parked overnight. Obviously this idea is a little ahead of its time, but it started me thinking about other widely distributed resources that could be coupled together to produce a single large resource.

The obvious answer that sprung to mind was computers. There are well over a hundred million PC’s in the world, with the number growing rapidly every week. The majority of these are in businesses, but the home market is very large in its own right. With the advent of WebTV’s and other net oriented devices, it is not unreasonable to suggest that most homes in the developed world will have some kind of home PC in the not too distant future – maybe within 10 years. By that time, these devices will probably be running at around 10GHz, and supporting 1Gbyte of memory. And also by that time it is likely that most such homes will have low cost high speed Internet access, whether by fibre, cable, satellite, ADSL over copper wire, or mains carried.

Most home computers are only used for a fraction of the day, and even with increased use for TV/net access, they are likely to be idle for say 12 hours per day.

Now, it is quite impractical for today’s home PC’s to be coupled together over the Internet. They do not have the necessary software, many do not have the hardware, net access is too slow, and not least, most people would strongly object if someone else was to grab their PC and use some of their electric supply.

However, let me paint the following scenario. Suppose that some large high tech multinational were to market a product with the kind of computing power already described, and with some high-speed net access. I am assuming that this device would be constantly powered on, with a low power stand by mode as common in TV’s and increasingly on PC’s. Suppose that they offered free net access in return for letting them have access over the net to the device while it was idle. This could be during restricted hours, or detected by monitoring, or some combination of the two. The device would obviously have built in hardware and software that enabled it to be used as a remote computer by the provider.

Suppose the total market for similar devices to be 200 million, and suppose this company were to gain 50% market share. Now what would they have? A global computer consisting of, on average, 50 million 10GHz processors with 50 million Gbytes of memory. That’s a lot of computer.

Of course there are various technical, political and marketing difficulties with this scenario – but none of them insuperable. It is hard to effectively utilise many parallel processors, but with that many, even inefficient utilisation would be immensely powerful. As the cost of communication falls with technical improvements, competition and increased market size, it becomes increasingly attractive to utilise distributed intelligence on a wide area.

If Bill Gates reads this, it could happen sooner than you think.