Mobile data centers offer different solutions to intense cloud computation problems

In a world of large data centers called clouds, intensive software processing applications that once took hours to do can be done in minutes if not seconds. One of the problems though is transit time from the point of data collection to the data center and back again.  The time to transmit data to and from a data center, the cloud,  is often limited by the speed of the internet. This is not a problem for some applications, but for other applications, such as Internet of Things, applications, where a machine must respond to tens of thousands of events quickly, it can be problematic. The time to send the data can far exceed the time to process the data.

Simply put, does this mean that data centers should be smaller and placed, almost everywhere. Or should they continue as they are as a massive buildings containing thousands if not millions of microprocessors.

Recent data architecture trends suggest that the future will need both and will have both. Data scientist look at the pool of over 8 billion cells phones and see a network of over 8 billion microprocessors that remain idle most of the time. Tapping into cell phone compute power may be one way of offering a new way to process and deliver large amounts of data quickly.

But there are more unused processors in the world that can be tapped. There are a large bank of computers at companies and organizations that go unused at night. As well, during the day, they are often underused. This begs the question, should PCs be designed differently. That is should they be designed so that they can be automatically configured and connected together as data centers.

There is even more unused computer powerout there and more coming on the horizon. Automobiles. Automobiles complete with processors for GPS applications and self-driving applications. With hundreds of millions of automobile processors sitting idle isn't it about time data architects think about how to connect these processors as the ultimate moving interconnected data center - the moving cloud.