WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS: Europe Wants a Supercomputer Made From Smartphones.

[I]n the tablet and smartphone age, it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to make supercomputers out of the engines of present-day digital life. The thinking goes that because ARM cores are designed to run on small smartphone and tablet batteries, a supercomputer built around them could yield more speed with less power. In an age when high-performance computing, or HPC, is often constrained by heat production and electricity consumption, that could mean a more scalable machine.

ARM is an acronym within an acronym; it stands for Acorn (the original manufacturer) RISC [Reduced Instruction Set Computing] Machine and is essentially an architectural standard for the computing hardware inside your smart phone.

The 'Wheels Within Wheels' title is just a recognition of the 'circularity' of computing architectures over my lifetime: from small, simple computers to big, centralized computers; to personal computers; to networks of personal computers (the 'cloud'); to smart phones; to networks of smart phones.

Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows....