- Old Pixel phones are being converted into cheap computer clusters
- Researchers stripped smartphones down to motherboards and implemented Linux
- Twenty retired phones can support applications used by 75 students
Millions of discarded smartphones are added to the global electronic waste stream every year, despite retaining significant computing power.
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego have now partnered with Google to investigate whether retired Pixel devices can be repurposed for practical computing tasks.
The project aims to reduce waste and at the same time reduce some demand for new hardware used in smaller data centers.
Researchers are turning retired smartphones into computer clusters
Google Research says retired mobile devices contribute to the embodied carbon associated with manufacturing and the wider environmental costs of consumer electronics.
Instead of letting these devices sit unused, the research team converted older Pixel smartphones into what it describes as a general-purpose computing platform.
The process involves removing components unnecessary for computing loads, including displays, batteries, cameras, speakers, and outer casings.
Only the motherboard remains because it contains the system-on-chip required for task processing and application execution.
The researchers then replace Android with a Linux-based operating system commonly used in data centers, allowing the deployment of orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
This process removes software costs associated with consumer devices while enabling management tools typically found in enterprise environments.
The researchers claim that phones released just three years ago still delivered stronger single-core benchmark performance than some server configurations.
They compared these devices to systems like the Asus RS720A-E11, which can be configured with Nvidia H200 or Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs along with two AMD EPYC processors.
Although these server platforms remain significantly more powerful overall, the results suggested that legacy mobile hardware still retains useful computing value.
Tests further indicated that between 25 and 50 retired smartphones could provide computing capabilities comparable to a single dual-socket server-class processor.
The key question, however, is not whether old smartphones can outperform modern servers, but whether they can deliver useful computing capacity at a significantly lower cost.
Local data centers can reduce costs for universities
The research revealed that a cluster of 20 smartphones could support an application used by a class of more than 75 students.
Instead of relying on cloud infrastructure, institutions could serve applications locally using repurposed devices already available in storage or recycling programs.
The team plans to assemble a facility using approximately 2,000 smartphones capable of supporting around 100 classes simultaneously.
They claim the approach could provide educational institutions with computing resources at a fraction of the cost of building traditional infrastructure.
Rising prices of memory and storage components have increased the cost of implementing new systems.
This makes alternative approaches more attractive to organizations with limited budgets.
This is not the first attempt to give older mobile devices a new lease of life, as previous studies have explored the use of phones for surveillance systems and other computing tasks.
Even NASA reused 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 consumer-grade hardware withstands continuous operation in a data center environment.
Via Tom’s hardware
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