It is always interesting to see the balance between the cost of electrical energy versus the amount of compute power than can be achieved. For many years we have seen the clock speeds of CPU's increase rapidly, though this has reduced somewhat in recent times in favour of the multi-core architecture, where we can make use of a number of low power consumption cores to effect the same result, with significant power savings. The higher clock speed we go the greater the demand on electrical power, we are now approaching an impasse where energy costs are now the main driving force behind supercomputer installations. GPU's have become a very popular high performance computing tool in over the past few years with their move to multicore architectures on the scale of 512 cores and upwards. It is now becoming a question a balance between CPU and GPU computing. We are now living in a world surrounded by low energy consumption mobile devices, many of the processors are moving into the Gigahertz range, and dual / quad-core phones / tables are becoming the norm. Can the computation power of these be somehow harnessed for scientific purposes whilst they are charging. When you think about it all those billions of mobile devices around the world just sitting there using just a fraction of their actual capabilities - is it an untouched computational resource just waiting to be discovered.
