A new competitor in the data center industry has emerged from the high street.

A US inventor has developed a scheme to harness unused domestic computing capacity and used it as a new type of distributed data center.

He’s been awarded US$20m to develop the concept of exploiting the ‘Dark Core’ of the Internet – the untapped mass of computing power that is idle for the majority of the time in every home and office computer.

California-based Gordon Campbell, founder of Silicon Valley technology start up Sviral, gained the funding from Toronto-based financier Pinetree Capital, for what Campbell described as “game changing technology”.

The invention can aggregate all the unused computing brains of PCs, Macs and even set top boxes that are connected to the Internet but not being used by their owners.

Campbell’s invention enables computers to communicate more effectively with each other and tap each other’s resources when they are needed.

In order to achieve this, Sviral has created software that overcomes latency and operating system issues and gets computers working in tandem.

Development of this software took a decade.

If enough devices are virtually connected together, the logical conclusion is a distributed data center, said Campbell.

The aggregation of the world’s untapped parallel processing could radically expand the world’s computing capacity, said Campbell.

The next phase of development involves creating applications that can use this capacity.

“What you are beginning to see are applications that are beginning to smear the edge of where compute resides,” said COO Paul Master.

“It can sit in the edge, the data center, in multiple sensors and you are beginning to see applications that live on top of this brand new infrastructure. The mobile edge and the core Internet are two sides of the same coin.”

Sviral’s sister company, LeoNovus, is now acting as a sales channel for the technology.

“We are very excited about this proof point. With this infusion of cash, we will work on getting this first product out the door,” said Master.