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Interesting idea, but I suspect if you tried it you'd quickly run into practical limitations. I know people who've tried running build farms with "development b
by pm215 9y ago
Interesting idea, but I suspect if you tried it you'd quickly run into practical limitations. I know people who've tried running build farms with "development board" hardware have found that the stress of 24x7 100% compute hits kernel bugs or overheating issues that 'normal use' doesn't, and I suspect mobile phones would be similar. The pace of phone evolution means you'd have an ongoing effort to get new kinds of devices into your 'cluster' (figuring out how to root them, identifying how to network them, rigging up some kind of custom rack-mounting hardware, etc). And there'd be a bigger turnover of 'replace expired device' than with fewer newer designed-for-server nodes.
The paper also suggests running a hypervisor on these, but I suspect you'd find that firmware/boot rom locks you out of EL2 (hypervisor mode) on most hardware.
- otp124 9y ago> I know people who've tried running build farms with "development board" hardware have found that the stress of 24x7 100% compute hits kernel bugs or overheating issues Interesting data points. Have any of these folks written a blog article on the subject?
- happycube 9y agoYup - and Linaro a few years ago wound up hacking up Saumsung Chromebooks to use for ARM buildfarms: http://systemcall.eu/blog/blog/2014/06/05/trashing-chromebooks/ http://systemcall.eu/blog/blog/2014/06/05/trashing-chromeboo...
- notgood 9y agoWell, why instead of 24*7 at 100% not use it in periods of 4 hours (with one hour breaks) at 80%; closer to the use they were intended for.
- nine_k 9y agoI suspect certain games, like Ingress, or GPU-intensive games, routinely max out phones' computing hardware. Chances are that badly overheating models are reasonably few and already known by gamers.
- morganvachon 9y agoMy experience with Ingress back in the day bears this out. That game would cause certain phones to reboot due to overheating, and others to throttle down so low they were worthless for playing.
- everheardofc 9y agoYeah except you're not going to reverse engineer the GPUs of a dozen SoCs just to save a few dollars on a beowulf cluster. Even in the best case you will reverse engineer one commonly used GPU and then pick phones based on that.