A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

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...

This idea has been around for a long time. See https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/present..., also https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2009/papers/anders...

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

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.

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?

Somewhat relevant: some of us have been using drawer-bound smartphones for web hosting.

https://far.computer

https://compost.party

Love to see it! Feels like the sort of give-a-damn that past Google was more about, versus challenging to do at present Google.

> With Google’s support, [researchers at the University of California San Diego] plan to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones

Ah.. well maybe success here will give internal folks some ammo for enabling more reuse of the mountain of Android (and Chromebook) devices.

The termux community are masters of creating useful servers with old phones.

This also solves alot of the security issues as your in a sandbox.

A Pixel phone is a pretty neat computer. I tried a short project to turn one into a voice assistant node and then into a balcony camera to watch my plants etc. Realistically I should have rooted it and installed a full Linux etc. because you have to use the limited Google primitives through Termux to access Google’s very good voice model with its wake word detection. Stitching those things together is (was?) more annoying on a Termux session with open software.

And the balcony camera didn’t work out because I wanted it to be solar powered and the angles of sunshine available to me without active tracking don’t give me sufficient energy on a daily basis.

But the machine is still a good machine. I will perhaps return to one of these projects. It’s annoying how much power access dominates everything.

Anyway, this is a cool project!

You guys should check acurast.com . This is decentralized compute network with over 200,000 retired devices connected.

You can already run any workloads on it at a fraction of a price of traditional cloud services.

This is coming from the same Google that's recently restricted third-party AOSP source access to biannual releases, severely limited the scope of Pixel sources (basically just GPL now) and started concealing their change history, AND is currently pushing developer verification and Play Integrity on Android :D

Not sure if I should take this as a joke or a sign of an internal power struggle. If it's the former, there's still some catching up to do before you can match Samsung's "Upcycle", but you're on the right track.

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.

I wanted to do this for like forever. So much computing just being tossed whenever I visit e-waste facilities. I was thinking that maybe AI can help automate the creation of a stripped down Linux that can be tailored for many phones and break some of the propietary blobs. We really need networking(ethernet?) and the CPU. Audio, accelerated GPU, cell, bluetooth etc can just be tossed. I was envisioning AI developed carrier boards that you could attach a phone motherboard to and it would help break out I/O and power. At this point it remains to be seen if AI can assist with this.

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

And who made the phones to retire? Google and other makers by closing firmware and bootloaders. And also by requiring more and more resources after each OS update and upgrade.

Cool concept, I hope it becomes fully realized, scaled, copied. Created a play prediction question to track that https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/by-eoy-2030-what-wil...

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

It’s counter intuitive to me that this is a net carbon win.

- Are these phone processors really as compute-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor?

- There’s so little embodied carbon in a phone motherboard - and presumably some embodied carbon in whatever custom racking hardware up is being used to house these. Is that really compute-power-per-embodied-carbon-footprint efficient than making a new server?

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?

> This is generally driven by people’s desire for a new device, including for the functionalities provided by new models.

So people are to blame, not the companies shoveling ads, offering promotions to buy new phones, and in general creating the huge demand that they later, "are forced to satisfy".

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/

> 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.

Ctrl+F PostmarketOS. No? No, apparently.

I liked Jennifer Switzer's junkyard computing paper and it's cool to see her still working this idea.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06870

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

Beowulf cluster time for old Pixels?

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.

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.

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.

EMMC in phones has a finite lifetime and dies after a few years of use. That it is not mentioned in the article tells me everything I need to know about its seriousness

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

> the mobile-oriented Android userspace must be replaced with a general-purpose Linux distro

c'mon Google, release that shit.

... carbon is fungible. Are they sure the effort of recycling them isn't higher than the effort of producing a single modern GPU?

If only the phones could run a real Linux, let us bring our normal payloads of tools & scripts!

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.

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...

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