MegaDroid experiment: Simulation of 300,000 Android phones in a lab

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?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: New Nexus devices must be Android 5.0 compatible [Rumor], Lightplay is an Android-powered projector by PhoneSuit,

Sandia Labs’ MegaDroid project simulates 300,000 Android phones to fight wireless catastrophes (video)

Sandia Labs' MegaDroid project simulates 300,000 Android phones to fight wireless catastrophes video

We’ve seen some large-scale simulations, including some that couldn’t get larger. Simulated cellular networks are still a rare breed, however, which makes Sandia National Laboratories’ MegaDroid project all the more important. The project’s cluster of off-the-shelf PCs emulates a town of 300,000 Android phones down to their cellular and GPS behavior, all with the aim of tracing the wider effects of natural disasters, hacking attempts and even simple software bugs. Researchers imagine the eventually public tool set being useful not just for app developers, but for the military and mesh network developers — the kind who’d need to know how their on-the-field networks are running even when local authorities try to shut them down. MegaDroid is still very much an in-progress effort, although Sandia Labs isn’t limiting its scope to Android and can see its work as relevant to iOS or any other platform where a ripple in the network can lead to a tidal wave of problems.

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Sandia Labs’ MegaDroid project simulates 300,000 Android phones to fight wireless catastrophes (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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