For those of you who watched the latest Resident Evil: Retribution movie, you would realize that Umbrella Corporation had this huge “stages” that simulated how a possible viral outbreak would pan out in an actual environment like Tokyo, New York and Moscow. Well, on a much smaller scale, an air-conditioned data center at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California sees half a thousand desktop computers that are properly lined up on racks, where they work together to form a homebrew computing cluster known as MegaDroid. They are specially stacked up to five levels high, and function to mimic the behavior of an entire city’s worth of Android smartphones.
Right now, up to 300,000 Android ‘phones’ are on the ‘network’, where the simulation will see these ‘phones’ send out text messages, consume wireless data as well as mimic the behavior of the phone’s radios or sensors. The future will see their software being used by groups that are working on social network applications, military battle planners, disaster relief workers and American hackers. It offers a scalable environment where one is able to see how a virus attack on an Android smartphone spreads, as well as help show user behavior in certain situations. Sounds like a nifty idea, don’t you think so?
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