One platform, a predicted mass of devices built on it; that’s the future of Android as Google and the Open Handset Alliance would have us believe.  Yet Nikita Ivanov envisages another application, turning the collective deployment of handsets running the open-source platform into an interconnected grid capable of worldwide peer-to-peer processing.  Ivanov works as part of the GridGain project, developing a free, open-source Java-based grid computing technology that can offset CPU-heavy tasks between multiple workstations (or cellphones) operating concurrently, and they’re now looking at how they can leverage Android’s unified APIs to facilitate an ad-hoc swarm grid between handsets.

What would that achieve?  So far GridGain seems reticent to voice their long-term plans, but Ivanov suggests that there are applications - such as human image recognition - that are more relevant to today’s high-powered smartphones than to a distant workstation.

“There is a special class of grid tasks that fits this type of grid perfectly: hyper-parallel grid tasks - the tasks that can easily split into thousands or even tens of thousand small micro-jobs where each such micro-job can take 2-3 seconds to get delivered onto processing device and spend another 5-10 seconds on it to get processed and send optional result back” Nikita Ivanov, Grid Computing

The potential is for cooperative processing between cellphones to further allow manufacturers to reduce their development costs; Android is already offered as a free-to-use resource, and if that common platform was coupled with grid-based shared computation then individual handsets could use lower-spec processors and take advantage of unused cycles in other devices to speed up intensive tasks.