Are smartphones really useful for scientific computing?

Abstract

Smartphones are a new kind of mobile devices that allow users to take their office anywhere and anytime with them. The number of smartphones is rapidly growing. Most of the time their capabilities are underused, therefore several authors have studied how to exploit smartphones for assisting scientific computing. Yet, as far as we know, there is no study aimed at determining whether smartphones can do a significant contribution to this area as resource providers. This paper shows that smartphones are not that slow when compared to standard mobile devices, such as notebooks. Furthermore, a notebook running on battery only performed 8 times more work than a low-end smartphone before their batteries run out. However, the low-end smartphone is 145 times slower than the notebook, and the smartphone battery has less capacity than the notebook battery. Since smartphones can execute large amount of work running on battery, we think that smartphones can have a major role in building the next-generation HPC infrastructures. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.