- Old Pixel phones are being rebuilt into low-cost computing clusters
- Researchers reduced smartphones to motherboards and deployed Linux
- Twenty retired phones can support apps used by 75 students
Millions of discarded smartphones add to the global e-waste flow each year, even though they retain significant computing capabilities.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have now teamed up with Google to determine whether decommissioned Pixel devices can be repurposed for practical computing workloads.
The project aims to reduce waste while easing demand for new hardware used in smaller-scale data centers.
Researchers turn obsolete smartphones into computing clusters
Google Research indicates that mobile devices removed from the market contribute to the embodied carbon associated with manufacturing and the broader environmental cost of consumer electronics.
Rather than letting these devices sit idle, the research team converted older Pixel smartphones into what it describes as a general-purpose computing platform.
The approach involves removing unnecessary components for IT workloads, including displays, batteries, cameras, speakers and exterior enclosures.
Only the motherboard remains because it contains the system-on-a-chip necessary for processing tasks and running applications.
The researchers then replace Android with a Linux-based operating system commonly used in data centers, enabling the deployment of orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
This process removes the software overhead associated with consumer devices while enabling management tools normally found in enterprise environments.
Researchers say phones released just three years ago still offered higher single-core benchmark performance than some server configurations.
They compared these devices to systems such as the Asus RS720A-E11, which can be configured with Nvidia H200 or Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs alongside two AMD EPYC processors.
Although these server platforms remain significantly more powerful overall, the results suggest that older mobile hardware still retains useful computing value.
Testing further indicated that between 25 and 50 withdrawn smartphones could offer computing capabilities comparable to a single dual-socket server-class processor.
However, the key question is not whether older smartphones can outperform modern servers, but whether they can provide useful computing capacity at a significantly lower cost.
Local data centers could reduce costs for universities
The research found that a cluster containing 20 smartphones could support an application used by a class of more than 75 students.
Instead of relying on cloud infrastructure, institutions could operate their applications locally using repurposed devices already available in storage or recycling programs.
The team plans to assemble a facility using around 2,000 smartphones capable of supporting around 100 classes simultaneously.
They argue that this 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 expenses for deploying new systems.
This makes alternative approaches more attractive to budget-constrained organizations.
This isn’t the first attempt to give old mobile devices a second life, as previous studies have explored using phones to monitor 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 plans to launch the full platform later this year, while also evaluating how consumer hardware holds up to continuous operation in a data center environment.
Via Tom’s Hardware
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