Intel concept marries smartphones and cloud computing

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Intel concept marries smartphones and cloud computing

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 13 May, 2009

READ MORE: Intel | Handset

The spread of applications and web services into 'the cloud' creates huge opportunities for mobile operators - if they can become the companies that host their users' data and apps on their vast servers, accessed across the internet from phones as well as PCs. But the investment in infrastructure, and the risks of the wireless web, remain as obstacles, and cloud-based services for mobiles remain in their infancy.

Researchers at Intel have come up with on approach that could improve the marriage of cloud computing and smartphones. According to TelecomTV, a mobile internet device would be 'cloned' in the data center cloud and then the clone would support its alter ego out in the field. A complete online copy of the device's data and applications, up to several Gb in size, would be kept in the cloud and synced with the 'real' phone to keep itself updated - sounding uncannily close to the concepts of many science fiction writers and, more recently, the thinker Raymond Kurzweil.

Intel may not yet be replicating the intelligence and 'souls' of humans in its cloud, but for the operator, or a cloud provider like Google, the 'clonecloud' would have two advantages - improved support for the user, and the offloading of many processor intensive tasks to the back end infrastructure, reducing stress on the phone and cellular network, and cutting down on battery drain. The results would be returned across the internet to the phone, speeding up tasks like graphics processing and supporting high end video or gaming. Intel even says Clonecloud would be able to decide dynamically whether a task would be better processed by the device itself or in the cloud, depending on its processing burden and the quality of the network connection.

Clonecloud will be described in detail at the HotOS XII conference in Switzerland this month. Many issues, notably with security, will remain, but Intel - which is also a prime mover behind the call for cloud standards - is clearly trying to put its technologies at the heart of a trend that, to have the impact Google and others claim it will, will have to embrace mobile devices.

As TelecomTV points out, the logical extension would be for multiple devices of different formats - phones, PCs, MIDs, games players and future products - all to draw on a personal data and apps store, held in the cloud on a 'masterclone'. This would allow for simultaneous updating of all a user's devices, especially if they were all based on a common software platform, which could (in Google's dream world at least) be Android.