People: He Ba, Colin Funai, Cristiano Tapparello, Zhiming (Kate) Zeng, Abner Aquino, Shurouq Hijazi, Wendi Heinzelman, William Nickles (Harris) and Jiye Shi (UCB)


Sponsors:


Project overview:
Cloud computing provides an approach to access shared computing resources as a service. Traditionally, the cloud is a group of powerful computers, i.e., servers, personal computers, laptops, etc. However, the traditional cloud computing system usually focuses on performance rather than energy efficiency. As the use of energy resources has raised global concerns, looking for more energy efficient approaches to provide computing power is an urgent task for researchers.

In this project, we design and develop a mobile computing system prototype, namely GEMCloud (Green Energy Mobile Cloud), that utilizes distributed mobile devices to cooperatively accomplish large parallelizable computational tasks. The main purpose of designing such a system is to find a green approach by making use of the massive amount of idle computing power on mobile devices. In addition, we have found that a mobile computing system has significant advantages in energy efficiency over traditional desktop computing systems.
GEMCloud Study:
We are now conducting a study to analyze the practical operation of our GEMCloud computing infrastructure using Android mobile devices as cloud servers while they are simultaneously being used for their intended functions. The goal is to determine how users interact with the GEMCloud infrastructure and whether using GEMCloud has any impact on the users' experiences with their mobile devices. The GEMCloud App is listed on Google play store . Devices with GEMCloud app installed will perform task computations and return the results to the server according to the device owner's preference settings.

Visualized Data Based on the IP address each task is sent from, we can approximate where the tasks were processed and locate them on google map as shown below.




GEMCloud Study 1st Phase Prize:
From 10/30/2013 to 2/10/2014 (EST), we provided each qualified participants (including completion of both the initial and final surveys and running GEMCloud on your own device (Android 2.3 and up)) a $20 gift card from Amazon.com. Besides, all qualified participants (entered on or before Dec.11, 2013) have entered for drawings for a Google Nexus 7 tablet (5 in total). We congratulate Michael, Samuel, Florence, Vinay and Norman on winning the Nexus 7 tablets! Our congratulations also go to the qualified participants who received the Amazon gift cards. We appreciate everyone's participation and continuing contribution to this study!