A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

rbanffy

Speaking as someone who has a cluster of four RPi Zero W’s mounted in an Ikea picture frame running as a Docker Swarm cluster, I LOVE this idea.

zipy124

This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with 7 years of support, but others such as Sony are 4 years, and Xiaomi on non-flagship devices are similar, or Samsung on their lowest budget models...

mhd

Beowulf cluster time for old Pixels?

maz1b

I've always wondered what that would be like. A fleet of 50 relatively modern flagship smartphones, wiped and retrofitted software wise to act as a homogeneous server, running ubuntu or centos or fedora, something like that.

noodlesUK

I would love to see regulation that required making bootloaders unlockable to enable this sort of thing. People have been making clusters of consumer hardware for decades: I’m sure people remember the PS3 supercomputers of the mid 2000s. I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.

christophilus

Well, I really don’t like Google, but if they make this a thing, I’d switch to Android and put Graphene on it or whatever just so I could tie into this. This is an excellent idea.

madduci

I love the take about it. But nowhere is mentioned how have they installed Linux on those boards and which kind of distribution. I would also run Linux on retired phones, just I can't because some of them have a locked bootloader and the unlocking method doesn't work anymore, because the producer has retired the tool

newsclues

Do many people really have a stockpile of working old phones? From my observations, phones get destroyed, used until the battery swells and breaks them, or handed down to kids or less careful users. No one I know has a bunch of old phones that are still useful but unused.

denysvitali

Sounds like a marketing focused and less technical perspective of: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/

planb

Sometimes I have weird fantasies about a post apocalyptic world where factories burned down and people have to live with the tech that’s available. No network, just off site solar power or generators, only local devices. I think it’s interesting to think about how far we could get with this. Does anyone have recommendations for novels, movies or video games with that topic?

tetris11

Ctrl+F PostmarketOS. No? No, apparently.

dzonga

in a weird way - this shows how much of a premium there's with cloud computing, while also showing how much computation power is in consumer devices.

Havoc

Is be more enthusiastic about this if one could remove the batteries. Dealing with spicy pillows is a pain

louismerlin

Somewhat relevant: some of us have been using drawer-bound smartphones for web hosting. https://far.computer https://compost.party

xnx

> Prior to deployment, smartphones must be processed to remove all but the motherboard I wonder how long this takes per phone. Presumably it could be a pretty fast shucking process if you don't care about any of the other components. I can't see it making much economic sense if it takes more than 1 minute/phone.

gnerd00

Maps Camp Google 2007 -- to the assembled 400+ engineers and guests, at the podium. A calm and thoughtful pitch during the five minute talks "You at Google have a special responsibility, we all do, to make a closed loop industrial ecology with this hardware".. Later that month, bills unpaid, rent payments on credit, the blog EWasteInsights folds after two years.. Silicon Valley Bank has a another boozy party...

wky

This is neat. This group’s approach of treating the devices as many weaker servers (basically a raspberry pi cluster) sounds like the most realistic way to reuse phone hardware at scale, especially with the backing of the actual hardware vendor. It’s a genuine shame how locked down iPhones are compared to even Android. Hypothetically you could run Linux inside UTM[0] but outside the EU Apple makes it intentionally difficult, and there’s still memory restrictions and performance penalties. My group’s senior year project was a computing cluster on phones (specifically targetting LLM inference) [1]. Instead of installing a new OS we built separate apps per OS. Our devices were older, so the Android phones had worse hardware and the iPhones had more software restraints. [0] https://getutm.app/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories

taffydavid

I'm delighted to see at least someone is trying this. There are also millions of old laptops discarded every year, often with perfectly capable motherboards, but with minor issues outside of the compute (keyboards, screens, dead battery) which are just not economical to repair. Surely with the right software you can turn 10x 8GB i5 motherboards into something more than the sum of it's parts?

Elfener

Very weird that this is coming from Google, given that they made their phone platform specifically to not let you install your own operating system. And now, they're making it illegal to install custom apps too: https://keepandroidopen.org/

yjftsjthsd-h

So did they just make a cloud out of computers that can't run a current kernel? That seems like a pretty big caveat