Intel Research Berkeley has been working on a project called “CloneCloud.”  The idea is to offload processing to a cloned copy of the phone that lives in the cloud.  Pretty cool.  To make it work, you have to clone the data and the full application context of each smartphone and manage it centrally. 

The challenge is that the phone now lives in two places – in your hand and in the cloud – and you have to make sure the state of the phone and the state of the clone is consistent.  But if you do it right, smartphones are no longer islands of segmented data but rather a loose federation of compute power with shared data.

Here’s the paper http://berkeley.intel-research.net/bgchun/clonecloud-hotos09.pdf

Here’s an article about it http://www.rethink-wireless.com/?article_id=1363