- Old Pixel phones are being rebuilt into low-cost computing clusters
- Researchers reduced smartphones to motherboards and implemented Linux
- Twenty retired phones can support apps used by 75 students
Millions of discarded smartphones add to the global e-waste stream each year despite retaining substantial computing power.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have partnered with Google to investigate whether retired Pixel devices can be repurposed for practical computing workloads.
The project aims to reduce waste while alleviating some demand for new hardware used in smaller scale data centers.
Researchers turn retired smartphones into computer clusters
Google Research says retired mobile devices contribute to the embodied carbon associated with manufacturing and the broader environmental cost of consumer electronics.
Instead of allowing those devices to sit unused, the research team converted older Pixel smartphones into what it describes as a general-purpose computing platform.
The approach involves removing unnecessary components for computing workloads, including displays, batteries, cameras, speakers and exterior casings.
Only the motherboard remains because it contains the system-on-chip necessary to process tasks and run applications.
The researchers then replace Android with a Linux-based operating system commonly used in data centers, enabling the implementation of orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
This process eliminates the software overhead associated with consumer devices while enabling management tools typically found in enterprise environments.
Researchers say phones released just three years ago still offered stronger single-core benchmark performance than some server configurations.
They compared those devices to systems like the Asus RS720A-E11, which can be configured with Nvidia H200 or Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs alongside two AMD EPYC processors.
Although those server platforms remain significantly more powerful overall, the results suggested that older mobile hardware still retains useful computing value.
Testing further indicated that 25 to 50 recalled smartphones could provide computing power comparable to that of a single dual-socket server-class processor.
However, the key question is not whether old smartphones can outperform modern servers, but whether they can offer useful computing power at a significantly lower cost.
Local data centers could reduce costs for universities
The research revealed that a cluster containing 20 smartphones could support an app used by a class of more than 75 students.
Instead of relying on cloud infrastructure, institutions could operate applications locally using repurposed devices already available in storage or recycling programs.
The team plans to set up a facility using approximately 2,000 smartphones capable of supporting around 100 classes simultaneously.
They argue that the approach could provide educational institutions with computing resources at a fraction of the cost of building traditional infrastructure.
Rising prices for memory and storage components have increased the expense of deploying new systems.
This makes alternative approaches more attractive to organizations with limited budgets.
This isn't the first attempt to give older mobile devices a second life, as previous studies explored using phones for system monitoring and other computing tasks.
Even NASA repurposed the Qualcomm 801 processor, originally introduced in 2014, for navigation functions associated with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter and the Perseverance mission.
The research team expects to launch the full platform later this year while evaluating how the consumer hardware stands up to continuous operation in a data center environment.
Via Tom Hardware
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