Nowadays many millions of computers are online day and night. Some are running games or playing or editing multimedia, others help users to browse the Internet. Office computers are processing documents and graphics, compiling source code, and much more. They certainly do lots of computations. Trillions of operations per second. But have you ever wondered what percent of power of your computer is actually used? I'm pretty sure it is very low.
Whenever you switch from playing a game to browsing the Internet or watching a movie, most of your computer's power is turned off to save some energy. While I'm writting this blog post, my CPU usage does not increase above as less as 10%, memory usage is below 25% and graphics card with its enourmous computing power is idle almost all the time.
That raises the question: what if we could use this power properly? Three or four multimedia computers with modern hardware interconnected by WiFi or Ethernet, and being cooperated, could bring outstanding game graphics via currently unavaliable to end users (because of high cost) high quality techniques like ray tracing. Video converting, compilation, any most other parallelizable data processing would be much faster. Many people can benefit from sharing their computer's power with each other.
There are a number of volunteer computing projects, most focused on science, like SETI@home (BOINC platform). Some are very specific (like distcc). Some have totally different approaches, like OnLive service.
The goal of CoreCloud is to provide a simple, scalable approach to use existing computer powers at their best. At office or at home all that you would need to share computing powers with your colleagues or family is to tell the system who can use your computer's free cycles, and what percent of otherwise wasted resources they can access. Having broadband, you would also be able to share them with entire the Internet.
Has the humanity already had enougth computing power to run the first artificial intelligence? We might have a chance to prove it has.
