A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

9 hours ago

Researchers at UC San Diego, supported by Google, are exploring 'phone cluster computing' to give smartphones a second life in cloud computing.
The project aims to reduce embodied carbon emissions by redeploying retired smartphone motherboards, which account for about 50% of hardware manufacturing emissions.
A datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones is planned to provide low-cost, low-carbon computing for hundreds of researchers and students by Fall 2026.
Modern smartphones' performance cores are comparable to servers, but they require targeting applications that fit their memory and processing capabilities.
Smartphones are processed to remove unnecessary components like displays and batteries, then their OS is replaced with a general-purpose Linux distro for cloud use.
Kubernetes manages containerized applications across clusters of 25-50 phones, with early tests showing effective support for class grading at lower latency than AWS.
The deployment will serve as a testbed for reliability under sustained use, offering computing equivalent to 50 servers at reduced cost and environmental impact.

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