PlugCloud - Scaling by Plugging a Personal Cloud Infrastructure

We present a novel elastic system architecture called Plug Cloud, which aims to increase the power of low-compute (and possibly mobile) devices, such as tablets, through distributing high-compute tasks, such as rendering, data analysis and visualization, to a set of Plug Computers [1, 2] that can be added or removed from the system incrementally. These devices are connected through a wired/wireless connection and the network is formed seamlessly with zero configurations. Plug Cloud allows users of low-compute devices to acquire more processing power externally on demand by plugging one or more plug-computers as needed. Furthermore, it allows a user to remove the plug-computer safely at any time without bringing down the whole system. This makes an elastic network where it can expand and shrink automatically with one or more plug-computers being added or removed from the system. This innovative architecture forms a personal cloud infrastructure on demand to support users' computational needs. We have implemented a computer graphics rendering application using Plug Cloud architecture. We will demo our architecture and prototype system using a tablet and several plug-computers.