Personal Supercomputer

Sorry the title is misleading in the sense that I don't think most of us will carry supercomputers in our bags in the near future. However we are all regular use supercomputer users - just think on Google which runs the largest supercomputer on earth. Naturally we see it as a service but technically it's a supercomputer; it does a task which our home computer couldn't do, neither our department server at the workplace. We can naturally argue that the whole the web is a supercomputer which is true but the difference is that in the web the networking capability is crucial (to be able to reach the server from everywhere) and most websites could run on a single computer while Google needs the huge processing power and storage capacity too. 

I beet as the time goes on we will have more and more services running on Internet Supercomputers and these services will get integrated into the applications and OS of the devices. As computers (e.g. tablets or notebooks) are getting flatter and lighter, the internet access easier and faster there will be a way to port part of programs or services to the cloud. Even if these devices can do the processing easily they should aim for the longest battery life and use local resources as less as possible. A classic example is the Amazon Silk browser which does a large part of processing in the web. 

Could we do it with other applications as well? I think yes however there is a slight difficulty.  With a web browser it's acceptable that it can't run if there is no internet access but other software should run - if albeit limited - without web connection as well. For example an engineering application should at least be able to store and display the latest design, a game to run with a scaled down grafics and a word processor display preview and do editing in draft mode at least... 

The other limitation may be the bandwidth. The largest part of internet traffic consists of videos. I think that preprocessing of videos is possible but most probably at the expense of bandwidths. A personal supercomputer platform must find a tradeoff between local resources and bandwidth. 

All this requires a new type of operating systems which can manage this dynamic off and downloading of tasks. Google Chrome OS is only a humble start because it's not much more than a browser. I dare to think that Microsoft has an opportunity here.