7 ms·

A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

323 points by vikas-sharma 4mo ago

rbanffy 4mo ago
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.
- cloud8421 4mo ago
  That’s cool, do you have a write up about it?
  - rbanffy 4mo ago
    I never did. I probably should.
zipy124 4mo ago
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...
- RetroTechie 4mo ago
  Obviously you'd have to replace the OS with an up-to-date one to use the phone as a cluster node. But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones? If it works only for phones sold by Google once, same question holds. And applies to other vendors. As you said: the "phone becomes useless just because OEM drops support" cycle needs to be broken. Well.. that and ability for end-users to replace batteries, screen, fix connectors etc. Also it's unclear how data would move in & out of these old-phone-compute-nodes. USB-C? Article is a bit light on details there.
  - djfergus 4mo ago
    The lack of open, replaceable software is the main blocker. The article talks about only keeping the motherboard anyway. End users don’t need to replace screens, ports and batteries if there is reasonable cost parts and skilled labour available. I’m happy with a trade off where a device has extreme miniaturisation and water resistance but needs someone with some surface mount soldering skill and the right tools to work on it. Regardless, many (most?) phones hardware will last longer than the software running on it.
  - d3Xt3r 4mo ago
    Replacing the OS is only one part of the equation, it doesn't mean you're replacing the low-level firmware blobs provided by various chipset vendors (like Qualcomm). For phones before the Project Treble era (~2018), the OS, the kernel, and the vendor blobs were all deeply intertwined with each other. Because you can't get newer blobs from the hardware vendors, it's generally not possible to run a newer OS on those devices. Community-made custom ROMs (like CM/LOS) had to rely on hacky workarounds to get newer Android versions to run on older kernels, which lead to stability issues and the famous "what works/what doesn't work" meme. For Treble-supported phones, the OS framework is decoupled from the vendor implementation. This means that you can run the latest OS (using a Generic System Image) on top of the older vendor blobs. BUT you are usually still stuck with an older kernel, as those proprietary blobs still rely on the vendor's specific kernel drivers, although it's a bit more stable compared to pre-Treble due to the decoupling and the standardised vendor interface. In either case (pre/post Treble) the main problem is that your low-level firmware remains permanently out-of-date, which puts your device at risk. An up-to-date OS can mitigate application-level risks, but not all of it. For eg, it cannot protect against attacks targeted towards the baseband modem, the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth controllers. If a vulnerability is found in the cellular modem firmware (like the infamous Broadpwn or Kr00k exploits), no custom ROM or other OS (PostmarketOS etc) can patch it because only the chipset OEM has the source code to update that specific chip. So unless all the various chipset OEMs come to the party and either release the sources or provide updated blobs, these devices can never be trusted for use in a production environment.
    - saagarjha 4mo ago
- djfergus 4mo ago
  Exactly this. Few phones allow bootloader unlock let alone open drivers that can be brought forward to a mainline kernel. The article seems to refer to a 2023 Pixel Fold as one of their candidates - I guess a good opportunity if those fragile screens get damaged but not a cheap used device otherwise. Even normal slab pixel devices have limited support for true android replacements like PostmarketOS let alone cheaper 3rd party devices usually running Mediatek/Exnos SOC that have zero open docs or support.
- binyu 4mo ago
  > This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems Couldn't Google somehow fix this? Since they control the substrate (Android) and they would be doing it for their convenience
  - redleader55 4mo ago
    Unfortunately it is a bit more complicated than that. All these phones run firmware, bootloaders, libraries under license from SoC providers, who package components from other vendors under a license themselves. Opening up the bootloader can be done, but two things have to happen: either the phone is crippled of various functionalities or the manufacturer is in breach of license because all the binary blobs become open and can be reverse engineered. No one wants to go through all of this for a few hundred people who are interested in running their home assistant on an exotic device.
    - dvdkon 4mo ago
      I haven't ever heard of an SoC supplier demanding that the device's bootloader must be locked. Are you sure that this is happening? I've only ever seen devices delete first-party blobs, presumably of the manufacturer's own volition.
      - realusername 4mo ago
        Unisoc mandates locked bootloaders, but it's true, the majority doesn't care, they just want to sell the SOC
  - ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
    Why would they? They're actively working on closing the ecosystem even more (no more sideloading), DRM features, etc. Maybe they'd do it for themselves, but they clearly don't want you, the customer, to do whatever you want with the device you bought and paid for.
  - Elfener 4mo ago
    They're literally doing the opposite, right now you can't install a custom operating system, but in the near future you won't be able to install custom apps either: https://keepandroidopen.org/ https://keepandroidopen.org/
- azkalam 4mo ago
  Google has so much influence over the hardware manufacturers. They should do more. Does anyone in the industry know why so much firmware is proprietary?
  - xyzzy_plugh 4mo ago
    I've worked with manufacturers who shipped us binary blobs for their hardware. They are often willing to customize the software for you, but they want to own the modifications, which they can use for other customers. A big part of many contracts is a services component where they provide features or advanced functionality, and this lets them mark up their bill substantially. They're existentially scared of their hardware being cloned or their customers building in-house solutions, so they have to stay competitive on that front. It's also a huge pain in the ass for them to release software as open source. They would need to track all the different forks and modifications in an organized manner (they often do a lot of copy paste and one-off nonsense). They run pretty light staffing on a lot of these components and doing all of that is just another chore for their overworked devs. Lastly, I've heard they sometimes use other commercial, closed-source software components which they can't easily relicense. Is this all bullshit? Yes absolutely. I'm not defending them but these are the excuses they give.
- II2II 4mo ago
  The article seems to be fairly clear about this: it is Google focusing on Google phones (so unlocking the bootloader should not be an issue) and they did mention that the kernel would have to be replaced (albeit for other reasons). I would think the main factor against such clusters is cost. Even if the four year old phones are free, they have to be dismantled, tested, and supporting hardware/software has to be developed. All of that would have to be done on an ongoing basis. While Google may have the volume to be able to build uniform clusters with a given generation of hardware, generations are measured in months. Using four year old hardware also trims four years off the expected life expectancy of the components, and that is comparing like to like (not consumer grade hardware to server grade hardware). I've got to wonder how all of that extra work affects the carbon-footprint they are trying to reduce. It would probably be more effective to increase the use life of the phone as a phone. All of that is fine for a research project or, on smaller scales, hobby projects. It would be extraordinarily difficult to make it commercially viable.
  - MRaid 4mo ago
    I pretty much agree with everything you said. But I think there is a chance for this to be commercially viable if it is offered in a different way. I,e not just raw cloud computing maybe you can run games on these clusters and jack the price a little. This is highly dependant on the virtual age of these clusters if they survive 10 of continuos work maybe there is a chance
    - bigiain 4mo ago
      I wonder if this is a research project about mitigating the risk of not being able to procure compute hardware if the AI industry soaks up all available hardware manufacturing capacity and raw materials? I wonder if someone's trying to work out if they can keep GCP alive when there's no ram or cpu to be bought at any price because the AI companies (including the AI division in Google) and Nvidea have completely broken commodity compute hardware supply chains?
      - MRaid 4mo ago
        i don't think that the ai hype will destroy compute procurment for normal cloud opertaions but you can be sure that it'll be used as an excuse to jack the prices a lot.
- t_mahmood 4mo ago
  I'm using a OnePlus 7, as my daily driver. Because it was bootloader unlockable, and LineageOS exists, I still can use it. And it performs respectfully, and serves my purpose. Except, my banking software, and digital payment applications, all works So, OEM just have to let us unlock the bootloader, just let us unlock it after they stop selling it, and it would reduce so much waste. They are just so greedy
- gruez 4mo ago
  >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. Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. They're doing it for more practical reasons, like the phone getting slow, the battery wearing out, or wanting a better camera. Moreover being able to replace firmware blobs/kernels/whatever doesn't mean such updates will actually materialize. For lineageos, many phones are stuck on 22.2 (android 15) because android 16 requires linux 5.4 and above, which means phones with earlier kernels are out of luck. Prior to this, there were phones from as early as 2016 (eg. the original Pixel) that could be upgraded to the latest Android. This isn't a "firmware blobs" or "locked down systems" problem. The kernel sources are available, and the kernel can be replaced, but nobody is going to bother upgrading the kernel for a 10 year old phone. https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/#legacy-devices https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/#legacy-devices >You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. This depends on the use case. If you're using this as some sort of NAS or compute cluster running trusted workloads, you should be fine as long as there isn't some sort of RCE in the kernel.
  - jauntywundrkind 4mo ago
    Phones don't actually get slower, or, they shouldn't, if they are reasonably well maintained. A battery swap might be necessary to preserve battery life under load. A NAND might start going bad. Apple just shipped iOS 27, which has support for 2019's iPhone 11. So we are around 7 years there. It's probably fine for many people's use! For a task like openclaw or hermes, or even something more aggressively graphical & GUI, it's not hard to imagine an 8 year old phone doing fine.
    - carlosjobim 4mo ago
      Battery swaps usually don't work very well, unfortunately.
      - 4mo ago
- throw-the-towel 4mo ago
  Which consumer ever cares about "security" updates on phones?
  - Aachen 4mo ago
    Some fraction of the ones that use the phone for password storage and banking. The latter seems to be nearly everyone, the former is very likely if there's a techy in their lives but since maybe 5-7 years it also seems to be becoming quite mainstream
  - theendisney 4mo ago
    People get scam emails all the time and most dont know the weird ui to display the sender adress and/or dont know what an untrustworthy mail address looks like. They might not understand the paranoia is real. Remember people running 20 virus scanners and 3 firewalls on their win xp machine? Then it finds 12 suspicious cookies?
- goodpoint 4mo ago
  > proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems caused by the very same Google...
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- thelastgallon 4mo ago
  Agreed. All parts of a device that we buy must be user replaceable. Phones can have decades of life. After their initial use as a first phone, they become a hand me down for their children, and they can become further hand me downs for people in third world countries or continue to live on as computers that can take on a variety of other roles. The OS must be user replaceable so we can run what we like. If this is not possible, we should at least be allowed to a run a VM on the phone (we can assume <5% loss of performance). Silicon lives matter. We must make sure our device has many afterlives until its eventual death (5 decades later).
  - red369 4mo ago
    Back before I got used to Google cancelling all of their projects, I was immensely excited, then disappointed by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  Just ask Mythos to jailbreak the phone OS for you ;-)
mhd 4mo ago
Beowulf cluster time for old Pixels?
maz1b 4mo ago
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.
noodlesUK 4mo ago
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.
- lucb1e 4mo ago
  Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked Yet I 100% agree on a generic computing device and they're not really that different in the end. Maybe that it needs to be unlockable after it has been on the market for 4 years or so (all units, no matter when they were sold, no matter if support ended) Or maybe undercutting the competition like this to make it back later on games is not a profit model we should want? And that everything should just be unlockable insofar as it has X amount of memory, CPU power, capable of doing IP traffic... something like that. (Seems silly to require a firmware unlock on your toaster)
  - LastTrain 4mo ago
    > I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked Sure it’s fair, and manufacturers could price accordingly. Legally enforceable is another story.
  - IsTom 4mo ago
    > were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? To be honest that has always had a smell to me akin to dumping.
    - 627467 4mo ago
      Differences between dumping and "loss leader"?
christophilus 4mo ago
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.
madduci 4mo ago
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
newsclues 4mo ago
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.
- pornel 4mo ago
  There are recycling and trade-in programs that could collect compatible phones and pass them on in bulk.
- jstanley 4mo ago
  They're not useful as phones, because the battery, screen, radio, etc. are damaged; but they may still have a working CPU inside, which would be sufficient for this project.
- fer 4mo ago
  I have Nexus 5, Xiaomi A1, Redmi Note 7, Samsung S7, and a Kindle Fire HDX, all running either LineageOS (Kindle) or PostmarketOS (the rest). PmOS ones run some not very demanding containers (scrapers) on k3s.
- t-3 4mo ago
  I have a drawer full of old phones with broken screens, obsolete chipsets, etc. I usually buy phones rather than get them through a contact plan with trade-ins though.
- jeffbee 4mo ago
  The article mentions the Pixel Fold. I suspect Google possesses every Pixel Fold ever made.
- david_allison 4mo ago
  I have a large amount, some are occasionally useful when debugging.
- nosioptar 4mo ago
  I did before the switch to volte. I recycled them wheb carriers decided to block a bunch of phones.
denysvitali 4mo ago
Sounds like a marketing focused and less technical perspective of: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/ https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/
planb 4mo ago
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?
- tetris11 4mo ago
  Book of Eli has vibes along those lines
- GCUMstlyHarmls 4mo ago
  Pump 6 and Other Stories has a few in that vein, sort of. Eg there are no petrol engines, instead compression springs, treadle operated computers, etc. There are some pretty grim stories in there, some may find them distasteful. https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/ https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/ Also I guess Silo / WOOL by Hugh Howey is perhaps closer to what you wrote literally but probably not quite the vibe maybe.
  - _shantaram 4mo ago
    Chiming in to second this, Pump Six and Other Stories left me with a deep, deep sense of dread after I finished reading it. Highly recommended, such an underrated collection.
- rapnie 4mo ago
  Besides published material, Cuba comes close. Kept frozen in time by eternal restrictive sanctions.
  - guestbest 4mo ago
    You don’t think the country is mismanaged?
- bshacklett 4mo ago
tetris11 4mo ago
Ctrl+F PostmarketOS. No? No, apparently.
- Zambyte 4mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516656 This earlier comment referenced it :)
dzonga 4mo ago
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.
yuuuuuwuu 4mo ago
[flagged]
Havoc 4mo ago
Is be more enthusiastic about this if one could remove the batteries. Dealing with spicy pillows is a pain
- nosioptar 4mo ago
  Aside from bootloaders, this is the only thing stopping me from using old devices for cool stuff.
- jon-wood 4mo ago
  They cover this in the article, they’re just running motherboards removed from the other components specifically because no one wants exploding phone batteries in their data centre.
louismerlin 4mo ago
Somewhat relevant: some of us have been using drawer-bound smartphones for web hosting. https://far.computer https://far.computer https://compost.party https://compost.party
seobot_dk1289 4mo ago
[flagged]
xnx 4mo ago
> 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.
gnerd00 4mo ago
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...
wky 4mo ago
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/ https://getutm.app/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories
- _fzslm 4mo ago
  Really interesting project. Do you have a link to a writeup/paper?
  - wky 4mo ago
    The closest thing would be our showcase poster[0], at some point I might write about the thought/development process (both for my sake and whoever picks up the project in the future) [0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jsJ5euZ4VXcwL4fbgJKMTQhqWdciRWFoTgwv_DEeLus/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jsJ5euZ4VXcwL4fbgJKM...
- stephenlf 4mo ago
  I doubt that many data centers or enterprises are interested in building phone clusters. I hope that this project will produce something that homelabs and self-hosters can build with 3D printers. That seems like the most probable end consumer.
taffydavid 4mo ago
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?
- valisvalis 4mo ago
  Yeah, I think the intention matters here. There might even be a whole business to be created from this.
Elfener 4mo ago
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/ https://keepandroidopen.org/
- gruez 4mo ago
  >given that they made their phone platform specifically to not let you install your own operating system. ??? You can still install alternate OSes (eg. grapheneos) on their latest phones. >And now, they're making it illegal to install custom apps too: https://keepandroidopen.org/ https://keepandroidopen.org/ Besides the questionable use of "illegal" (what are they going to do, send you to jail?), that's not even accurate. You can still install apps after a 24 hour wait, or no wait at all if you use adb.
  - bshacklett 4mo ago
    If they use anything that can be classified as a "digital lock" to enforce the policy, section 1201 of the DMCA comes into play. That includes potential criminal liability, resulting in fines and/or jail time as described by section 1204.
- jubilanti 4mo ago
  You say that as if Google is a single hive mind with every team and vertical perfectly aligned like the Borg. The article is pretty clear in the opening lines that this is a Google Research grant to the University of California, not even primarily done by Google employees.
- surajrmal 4mo ago
  There is nothing about Android as a platform that forbids installation of your own OS. That's a phone oem choice and the fact Pixel phones can be unlocked proves as much. In fact this is the reason this project is even possible.
  - Aachen 4mo ago
yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago
So did they just make a cloud out of computers that can't run a current kernel? That seems like a pretty big caveat
2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo ago
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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06870
seu 4mo ago
> 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".
jauntywundrkind 4mo ago
If only the phones could run a real Linux, let us bring our normal payloads of tools & scripts!
- seba_dos1 4mo ago
  I've been using GNU/Linux as my phone OS for the last 18 years on several devices, enjoying "normal payloads of tools & scripts". Aside of a short time around 2017-2019 I never carried and relied on any other phone. It's not some wishful fantasy, it already exists and works.
  - Aachen 4mo ago
    Me too, but surely you also notice they're slowly raising the temperature of the pot we're in?
    - seba_dos1 4mo ago
      I do see remote attestation as a grave threat not just to mobile phones, but to general purpose computing as a whole (well, aside of offline use cases perhaps). It creeps in slowly, but I'm hopeful we can still fight it off.
jrmg 4mo ago
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?
- Jaxan 4mo ago
  Producing phones emits a lot of CO2 (or equivalents). It takes more energy to produce, than the amount of energy a phone uses in its typical life. But yeah, these are great questions which are not obvious at all and should be answered when proposing such a system.
- Flere-Imsaho 4mo ago
  > Are these phone processors really as compute-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor? I have no numbers to back up my argument, but smart phones are very power efficient by their nature are they not? I can play a 3d game, with impressive graphics, on a tiny device powered by a battery... With very little heat generated. If your goal is to run LLM inference on a gpu in a power efficient manner, I bet a smart phone is a good place to start.
- Aachen 4mo ago
  I don't have time for an elaborate sourced answer but in short, yes, the efficiency gains of modern devices is almost negligible compared to the CO2e of producing a new device at current device lifespans. I can't remember if you would have to use a device for 15 or 25 years before upgrading is better than continuing to use it, but I thought it was 25 Edit: yes, 25. Found my go-to reference for this quickly after all > The report about the cost of planned obsolescence by the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential (i.e. the amount of CO₂-equivalent emissions caused). For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years to limit their Global Warming Potential. —https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-computing/ https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
m132 4mo ago
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.
m1333 4mo ago
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
- seba_dos1 4mo ago
  A few years? I have a bunch of phones from 2009 around that are still fully working and I have never had eMMC fail on any of them, and they use it for swap among other things. In my experience screens, batteries and USB ports fail much more often.
  - m1333 4mo ago
    Phone from 2009 uses SLC, or MLC with large SLC cache, thus capable of at least 10k FDW (full disk writes). Modern phones typically use TLC or QLC within a inch of their physical limits (signal to noise ratio), thus qualified typically only up to 500 FDW, which translates into several years of use. There are other mechanisms at play which further degrade this number, such as WAF (write amplification) and others
    - seba_dos1 4mo ago
      Just checked the datasheet of the eMMC 5.1 used in my 2020 phone that I use daily now and it's MLC. It also has optional pseudo-SLC mode.
- Aachen 4mo ago
  Only the very cheapest phones still have eMMC. I bought a Pixel phone second hand last year and it shows the wear level of the storage somewhere in the settings. I forgot the number but it was so low, extrapolation got me to something crazy like maybe 20 or 50 years of expected use at that rate That consumer rate isn't datacentre use, but not every task is write-to-persistent-storage intensive. You can also replace the sdcard and write to that instead if this is a worry (that's what I've been doing on my phones since I use them quite intensively; maybe that's overkill nowadays idk)
mlinksva 4mo ago
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-will-happen-with-g https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/by-eoy-2030-what-wil...
saturn8601 4mo ago
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.
radu_floricica 4mo ago
... carbon is fungible. Are they sure the effort of recycling them isn't higher than the effort of producing a single modern GPU?
- jon-wood 4mo ago
  Carbon is fungible right up until you make something out of it, at which point it’s really not without a significant effort. We can’t just take a mobile phone and decompose it back to its component atoms for reuse as something else, recycling is to some degree a myth, and to a greater degree incredibly energy demanding in itself to get things broken down to a level they can be turned into something new.
zx8080 4mo ago
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.
arjie 4mo ago
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!
shrubble 4mo ago
Google will do everything other than let you run stock Linux on a phone.
glaslong 4mo ago
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.
HotGarbage 4mo ago
> the mobile-oriented Android userspace must be replaced with a general-purpose Linux distro c'mon Google, release that shit.
forcer 4mo ago
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.
- Flere-Imsaho 4mo ago
  This is such a cool project. I run a Tor Snowflake node, so the of concept of enthusiasts contributing to a decentralised network interests me. However it does worry me that I've never heard of acurast... I consider myself pretty well read on the subject of decentralised projects, has it just not taken off?
filup 4mo ago
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.
nycerrrrrrrrrr 4mo ago
This idea has been around for a long time. See https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/presentation/shahrad https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/present..., also https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2009/papers/andersen-sosp09.pdf https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2009/papers/anders...
amelius 4mo ago
This would already exist ages ago if mobile computing was more open source friendly.
theendisney 4mo ago
Imagine you could buy some serial extendable base station and click all of your old phones in it. Applications could offload all kinds of tasks. You dont even need to invent useful applications the community will do it for you. But if you insist, think all kinds of cheap smart devices that offload the smart part.
llsf 4mo ago
Around 2015, I was working for a company that processed coupons for large retail stores. We had lots of performance issues, mostly due to our centralized database at the time. I was dreaming at the time to ship a mobile phone at every large store (e.g. Target) to process the data in-situ. It could hold its own database (partitioned for the tenant), it would have its own UPS (battery), and have enough CPU power to serve the POS requests of one store, even the largest ones. A mobile phone would be our on-prem server.
noisy_boy 4mo ago
It is ridiculous that I can pick up pretty much any average computer, install Linux on it and be on my way in an hour or so but have to go through so many hoops to do the same on Android and even then the results are mixed. We have been really shafted by the phone makers by the brainwashing that they are somehow extra special things. They are just computers with a radio in it. It is shameful.
awaisras 4mo ago
A google sponsored article mentioning t3.micro chef's kiss
agrijakhetarpal 4mo ago
[flagged]
fitsumbelay 4mo ago
hoped this would happen for a long time but knew it takes a Google sized momentum to make it happen. Formalizing the goal is great and brings it closer to reality
diimdeep 4mo ago
Computing platform with retired phones is not going to happen unless manufacturers add some budged for this to the motherboard design, expose high bandwidth interface similar to pci-e or usb4, we have now 80GB/s RAM phones with less than 1GB/s usb3 interfaces to the this beast computers, it is absurd.
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
This "paper" doesn't really have anything in it, it's just a proposal with some unhelpful graphs. I wonder what they think is the novelty here. People with small budgets have been building compute clusters out of second-hand upcycled hardware for a long time.
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
Is it still easy and cheap to get old, unwanted corporate laptops by the dozens? That seems a better way to go than locked-down-firmware phones
rishikeshs 4mo ago
> On average, people replace their phone every four years. This is generally driven by people’s desire for a new device, including for the functionalities provided by new models. This is so not true. I'm not replacing my phone because I want to. I'm replacing because your stupid updates break my phone and make it unusable. It's called Planned obsolescence
andai 4mo ago
SETI@phone
pvtmert 4mo ago
I guess the article is targeting regular people. However combining terms like "Linux distro" with other non technical explanations like "useless components such as screens, cameras, etc" sounded a bit weird to me. Also; For example, phones have a “low memory killer” daemon, which throttles memory-hungry applications. I mean, this is also needed for server applications, more-so than personal use. Reason being in fact a runaway process would interrupt many users rather than a single user in server versus client use cases respectively...
hulitu 4mo ago
Greeneashing by Google.

323 points by vikas-sharma 4mo ago

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.

cloud8421 4mo ago
That’s cool, do you have a write up about it?
- rbanffy 4mo ago
  I never did. I probably should.

zipy124 4mo ago

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...

RetroTechie 4mo ago
Obviously you'd have to replace the OS with an up-to-date one to use the phone as a cluster node. But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones? If it works only for phones sold by Google once, same question holds. And applies to other vendors. As you said: the "phone becomes useless just because OEM drops support" cycle needs to be broken. Well.. that and ability for end-users to replace batteries, screen, fix connectors etc. Also it's unclear how data would move in & out of these old-phone-compute-nodes. USB-C? Article is a bit light on details there.
- djfergus 4mo ago
  The lack of open, replaceable software is the main blocker. The article talks about only keeping the motherboard anyway. End users don’t need to replace screens, ports and batteries if there is reasonable cost parts and skilled labour available. I’m happy with a trade off where a device has extreme miniaturisation and water resistance but needs someone with some surface mount soldering skill and the right tools to work on it. Regardless, many (most?) phones hardware will last longer than the software running on it.
- d3Xt3r 4mo ago
  Replacing the OS is only one part of the equation, it doesn't mean you're replacing the low-level firmware blobs provided by various chipset vendors (like Qualcomm). For phones before the Project Treble era (~2018), the OS, the kernel, and the vendor blobs were all deeply intertwined with each other. Because you can't get newer blobs from the hardware vendors, it's generally not possible to run a newer OS on those devices. Community-made custom ROMs (like CM/LOS) had to rely on hacky workarounds to get newer Android versions to run on older kernels, which lead to stability issues and the famous "what works/what doesn't work" meme. For Treble-supported phones, the OS framework is decoupled from the vendor implementation. This means that you can run the latest OS (using a Generic System Image) on top of the older vendor blobs. BUT you are usually still stuck with an older kernel, as those proprietary blobs still rely on the vendor's specific kernel drivers, although it's a bit more stable compared to pre-Treble due to the decoupling and the standardised vendor interface. In either case (pre/post Treble) the main problem is that your low-level firmware remains permanently out-of-date, which puts your device at risk. An up-to-date OS can mitigate application-level risks, but not all of it. For eg, it cannot protect against attacks targeted towards the baseband modem, the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth controllers. If a vulnerability is found in the cellular modem firmware (like the infamous Broadpwn or Kr00k exploits), no custom ROM or other OS (PostmarketOS etc) can patch it because only the chipset OEM has the source code to update that specific chip. So unless all the various chipset OEMs come to the party and either release the sources or provide updated blobs, these devices can never be trusted for use in a production environment.
  - saagarjha 4mo ago
djfergus 4mo ago
Exactly this. Few phones allow bootloader unlock let alone open drivers that can be brought forward to a mainline kernel. The article seems to refer to a 2023 Pixel Fold as one of their candidates - I guess a good opportunity if those fragile screens get damaged but not a cheap used device otherwise. Even normal slab pixel devices have limited support for true android replacements like PostmarketOS let alone cheaper 3rd party devices usually running Mediatek/Exnos SOC that have zero open docs or support.
binyu 4mo ago
> This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems Couldn't Google somehow fix this? Since they control the substrate (Android) and they would be doing it for their convenience
- redleader55 4mo ago
  Unfortunately it is a bit more complicated than that. All these phones run firmware, bootloaders, libraries under license from SoC providers, who package components from other vendors under a license themselves. Opening up the bootloader can be done, but two things have to happen: either the phone is crippled of various functionalities or the manufacturer is in breach of license because all the binary blobs become open and can be reverse engineered. No one wants to go through all of this for a few hundred people who are interested in running their home assistant on an exotic device.
  - dvdkon 4mo ago
    I haven't ever heard of an SoC supplier demanding that the device's bootloader must be locked. Are you sure that this is happening? I've only ever seen devices delete first-party blobs, presumably of the manufacturer's own volition.
    - realusername 4mo ago
      Unisoc mandates locked bootloaders, but it's true, the majority doesn't care, they just want to sell the SOC
- ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
  Why would they? They're actively working on closing the ecosystem even more (no more sideloading), DRM features, etc. Maybe they'd do it for themselves, but they clearly don't want you, the customer, to do whatever you want with the device you bought and paid for.
- Elfener 4mo ago
  They're literally doing the opposite, right now you can't install a custom operating system, but in the near future you won't be able to install custom apps either: https://keepandroidopen.org/ https://keepandroidopen.org/
azkalam 4mo ago
Google has so much influence over the hardware manufacturers. They should do more. Does anyone in the industry know why so much firmware is proprietary?
- xyzzy_plugh 4mo ago
  I've worked with manufacturers who shipped us binary blobs for their hardware. They are often willing to customize the software for you, but they want to own the modifications, which they can use for other customers. A big part of many contracts is a services component where they provide features or advanced functionality, and this lets them mark up their bill substantially. They're existentially scared of their hardware being cloned or their customers building in-house solutions, so they have to stay competitive on that front. It's also a huge pain in the ass for them to release software as open source. They would need to track all the different forks and modifications in an organized manner (they often do a lot of copy paste and one-off nonsense). They run pretty light staffing on a lot of these components and doing all of that is just another chore for their overworked devs. Lastly, I've heard they sometimes use other commercial, closed-source software components which they can't easily relicense. Is this all bullshit? Yes absolutely. I'm not defending them but these are the excuses they give.
II2II 4mo ago
The article seems to be fairly clear about this: it is Google focusing on Google phones (so unlocking the bootloader should not be an issue) and they did mention that the kernel would have to be replaced (albeit for other reasons). I would think the main factor against such clusters is cost. Even if the four year old phones are free, they have to be dismantled, tested, and supporting hardware/software has to be developed. All of that would have to be done on an ongoing basis. While Google may have the volume to be able to build uniform clusters with a given generation of hardware, generations are measured in months. Using four year old hardware also trims four years off the expected life expectancy of the components, and that is comparing like to like (not consumer grade hardware to server grade hardware). I've got to wonder how all of that extra work affects the carbon-footprint they are trying to reduce. It would probably be more effective to increase the use life of the phone as a phone. All of that is fine for a research project or, on smaller scales, hobby projects. It would be extraordinarily difficult to make it commercially viable.
- MRaid 4mo ago
  I pretty much agree with everything you said. But I think there is a chance for this to be commercially viable if it is offered in a different way. I,e not just raw cloud computing maybe you can run games on these clusters and jack the price a little. This is highly dependant on the virtual age of these clusters if they survive 10 of continuos work maybe there is a chance
  - bigiain 4mo ago
    I wonder if this is a research project about mitigating the risk of not being able to procure compute hardware if the AI industry soaks up all available hardware manufacturing capacity and raw materials? I wonder if someone's trying to work out if they can keep GCP alive when there's no ram or cpu to be bought at any price because the AI companies (including the AI division in Google) and Nvidea have completely broken commodity compute hardware supply chains?
    - MRaid 4mo ago
      i don't think that the ai hype will destroy compute procurment for normal cloud opertaions but you can be sure that it'll be used as an excuse to jack the prices a lot.
t_mahmood 4mo ago
I'm using a OnePlus 7, as my daily driver. Because it was bootloader unlockable, and LineageOS exists, I still can use it. And it performs respectfully, and serves my purpose. Except, my banking software, and digital payment applications, all works So, OEM just have to let us unlock the bootloader, just let us unlock it after they stop selling it, and it would reduce so much waste. They are just so greedy
gruez 4mo ago
>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. Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. They're doing it for more practical reasons, like the phone getting slow, the battery wearing out, or wanting a better camera. Moreover being able to replace firmware blobs/kernels/whatever doesn't mean such updates will actually materialize. For lineageos, many phones are stuck on 22.2 (android 15) because android 16 requires linux 5.4 and above, which means phones with earlier kernels are out of luck. Prior to this, there were phones from as early as 2016 (eg. the original Pixel) that could be upgraded to the latest Android. This isn't a "firmware blobs" or "locked down systems" problem. The kernel sources are available, and the kernel can be replaced, but nobody is going to bother upgrading the kernel for a 10 year old phone. https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/#legacy-devices https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/#legacy-devices >You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. This depends on the use case. If you're using this as some sort of NAS or compute cluster running trusted workloads, you should be fine as long as there isn't some sort of RCE in the kernel.
- jauntywundrkind 4mo ago
  Phones don't actually get slower, or, they shouldn't, if they are reasonably well maintained. A battery swap might be necessary to preserve battery life under load. A NAND might start going bad. Apple just shipped iOS 27, which has support for 2019's iPhone 11. So we are around 7 years there. It's probably fine for many people's use! For a task like openclaw or hermes, or even something more aggressively graphical & GUI, it's not hard to imagine an 8 year old phone doing fine.
  - carlosjobim 4mo ago
    Battery swaps usually don't work very well, unfortunately.
    - 4mo ago
throw-the-towel 4mo ago
Which consumer ever cares about "security" updates on phones?
- Aachen 4mo ago
  Some fraction of the ones that use the phone for password storage and banking. The latter seems to be nearly everyone, the former is very likely if there's a techy in their lives but since maybe 5-7 years it also seems to be becoming quite mainstream
- theendisney 4mo ago
  People get scam emails all the time and most dont know the weird ui to display the sender adress and/or dont know what an untrustworthy mail address looks like. They might not understand the paranoia is real. Remember people running 20 virus scanners and 3 firewalls on their win xp machine? Then it finds 12 suspicious cookies?
goodpoint 4mo ago
> proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems caused by the very same Google...
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
thelastgallon 4mo ago
Agreed. All parts of a device that we buy must be user replaceable. Phones can have decades of life. After their initial use as a first phone, they become a hand me down for their children, and they can become further hand me downs for people in third world countries or continue to live on as computers that can take on a variety of other roles. The OS must be user replaceable so we can run what we like. If this is not possible, we should at least be allowed to a run a VM on the phone (we can assume <5% loss of performance). Silicon lives matter. We must make sure our device has many afterlives until its eventual death (5 decades later).
- red369 4mo ago
  Back before I got used to Google cancelling all of their projects, I was immensely excited, then disappointed by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
Just ask Mythos to jailbreak the phone OS for you ;-)

mhd 4mo ago

Beowulf cluster time for old Pixels?

maz1b 4mo ago

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.

noodlesUK 4mo ago

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.

lucb1e 4mo ago
Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked Yet I 100% agree on a generic computing device and they're not really that different in the end. Maybe that it needs to be unlockable after it has been on the market for 4 years or so (all units, no matter when they were sold, no matter if support ended) Or maybe undercutting the competition like this to make it back later on games is not a profit model we should want? And that everything should just be unlockable insofar as it has X amount of memory, CPU power, capable of doing IP traffic... something like that. (Seems silly to require a firmware unlock on your toaster)
- LastTrain 4mo ago
  > I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked Sure it’s fair, and manufacturers could price accordingly. Legally enforceable is another story.
- IsTom 4mo ago
  > were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? To be honest that has always had a smell to me akin to dumping.
  - 627467 4mo ago
    Differences between dumping and "loss leader"?

christophilus 4mo ago

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.

madduci 4mo ago

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

newsclues 4mo ago

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.

pornel 4mo ago
There are recycling and trade-in programs that could collect compatible phones and pass them on in bulk.
jstanley 4mo ago
They're not useful as phones, because the battery, screen, radio, etc. are damaged; but they may still have a working CPU inside, which would be sufficient for this project.
fer 4mo ago
I have Nexus 5, Xiaomi A1, Redmi Note 7, Samsung S7, and a Kindle Fire HDX, all running either LineageOS (Kindle) or PostmarketOS (the rest). PmOS ones run some not very demanding containers (scrapers) on k3s.
t-3 4mo ago
I have a drawer full of old phones with broken screens, obsolete chipsets, etc. I usually buy phones rather than get them through a contact plan with trade-ins though.
jeffbee 4mo ago
The article mentions the Pixel Fold. I suspect Google possesses every Pixel Fold ever made.
david_allison 4mo ago
I have a large amount, some are occasionally useful when debugging.
nosioptar 4mo ago
I did before the switch to volte. I recycled them wheb carriers decided to block a bunch of phones.

denysvitali 4mo ago

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

planb 4mo ago

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?

tetris11 4mo ago
Book of Eli has vibes along those lines
GCUMstlyHarmls 4mo ago
Pump 6 and Other Stories has a few in that vein, sort of. Eg there are no petrol engines, instead compression springs, treadle operated computers, etc. There are some pretty grim stories in there, some may find them distasteful. https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/ https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/ Also I guess Silo / WOOL by Hugh Howey is perhaps closer to what you wrote literally but probably not quite the vibe maybe.
- _shantaram 4mo ago
  Chiming in to second this, Pump Six and Other Stories left me with a deep, deep sense of dread after I finished reading it. Highly recommended, such an underrated collection.
rapnie 4mo ago
Besides published material, Cuba comes close. Kept frozen in time by eternal restrictive sanctions.
- guestbest 4mo ago
  You don’t think the country is mismanaged?
bshacklett 4mo ago

tetris11 4mo ago

Ctrl+F PostmarketOS. No? No, apparently.

Zambyte 4mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516656 This earlier comment referenced it :)

dzonga 4mo ago

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.

yuuuuuwuu 4mo ago

[flagged]

Havoc 4mo ago

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

nosioptar 4mo ago
Aside from bootloaders, this is the only thing stopping me from using old devices for cool stuff.
jon-wood 4mo ago
They cover this in the article, they’re just running motherboards removed from the other components specifically because no one wants exploding phone batteries in their data centre.

louismerlin 4mo ago

Somewhat relevant: some of us have been using drawer-bound smartphones for web hosting. https://far.computer https://far.computer https://compost.party https://compost.party

seobot_dk1289 4mo ago

[flagged]

xnx 4mo ago

> 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.

gnerd00 4mo ago

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...

wky 4mo ago

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/ https://getutm.app/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories

_fzslm 4mo ago
Really interesting project. Do you have a link to a writeup/paper?
- wky 4mo ago
  The closest thing would be our showcase poster[0], at some point I might write about the thought/development process (both for my sake and whoever picks up the project in the future) [0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jsJ5euZ4VXcwL4fbgJKMTQhqWdciRWFoTgwv_DEeLus/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jsJ5euZ4VXcwL4fbgJKM...
stephenlf 4mo ago
I doubt that many data centers or enterprises are interested in building phone clusters. I hope that this project will produce something that homelabs and self-hosters can build with 3D printers. That seems like the most probable end consumer.

taffydavid 4mo ago

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?

valisvalis 4mo ago
Yeah, I think the intention matters here. There might even be a whole business to be created from this.

Elfener 4mo ago

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/ https://keepandroidopen.org/

gruez 4mo ago
>given that they made their phone platform specifically to not let you install your own operating system. ??? You can still install alternate OSes (eg. grapheneos) on their latest phones. >And now, they're making it illegal to install custom apps too: https://keepandroidopen.org/ https://keepandroidopen.org/ Besides the questionable use of "illegal" (what are they going to do, send you to jail?), that's not even accurate. You can still install apps after a 24 hour wait, or no wait at all if you use adb.
- bshacklett 4mo ago
  If they use anything that can be classified as a "digital lock" to enforce the policy, section 1201 of the DMCA comes into play. That includes potential criminal liability, resulting in fines and/or jail time as described by section 1204.
jubilanti 4mo ago
You say that as if Google is a single hive mind with every team and vertical perfectly aligned like the Borg. The article is pretty clear in the opening lines that this is a Google Research grant to the University of California, not even primarily done by Google employees.
surajrmal 4mo ago
There is nothing about Android as a platform that forbids installation of your own OS. That's a phone oem choice and the fact Pixel phones can be unlocked proves as much. In fact this is the reason this project is even possible.
- Aachen 4mo ago

yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago

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

2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo ago

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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06870

seu 4mo ago

> 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".

jauntywundrkind 4mo ago

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

seba_dos1 4mo ago
I've been using GNU/Linux as my phone OS for the last 18 years on several devices, enjoying "normal payloads of tools & scripts". Aside of a short time around 2017-2019 I never carried and relied on any other phone. It's not some wishful fantasy, it already exists and works.
- Aachen 4mo ago
  Me too, but surely you also notice they're slowly raising the temperature of the pot we're in?
  - seba_dos1 4mo ago
    I do see remote attestation as a grave threat not just to mobile phones, but to general purpose computing as a whole (well, aside of offline use cases perhaps). It creeps in slowly, but I'm hopeful we can still fight it off.

jrmg 4mo ago

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?

Jaxan 4mo ago
Producing phones emits a lot of CO2 (or equivalents). It takes more energy to produce, than the amount of energy a phone uses in its typical life. But yeah, these are great questions which are not obvious at all and should be answered when proposing such a system.
Flere-Imsaho 4mo ago
> Are these phone processors really as compute-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor? I have no numbers to back up my argument, but smart phones are very power efficient by their nature are they not? I can play a 3d game, with impressive graphics, on a tiny device powered by a battery... With very little heat generated. If your goal is to run LLM inference on a gpu in a power efficient manner, I bet a smart phone is a good place to start.
Aachen 4mo ago
I don't have time for an elaborate sourced answer but in short, yes, the efficiency gains of modern devices is almost negligible compared to the CO2e of producing a new device at current device lifespans. I can't remember if you would have to use a device for 15 or 25 years before upgrading is better than continuing to use it, but I thought it was 25 Edit: yes, 25. Found my go-to reference for this quickly after all > The report about the cost of planned obsolescence by the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential (i.e. the amount of CO₂-equivalent emissions caused). For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years to limit their Global Warming Potential. —https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-computing/ https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...

m132 4mo ago

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.

m1333 4mo ago

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

seba_dos1 4mo ago
A few years? I have a bunch of phones from 2009 around that are still fully working and I have never had eMMC fail on any of them, and they use it for swap among other things. In my experience screens, batteries and USB ports fail much more often.
- m1333 4mo ago
  Phone from 2009 uses SLC, or MLC with large SLC cache, thus capable of at least 10k FDW (full disk writes). Modern phones typically use TLC or QLC within a inch of their physical limits (signal to noise ratio), thus qualified typically only up to 500 FDW, which translates into several years of use. There are other mechanisms at play which further degrade this number, such as WAF (write amplification) and others
  - seba_dos1 4mo ago
    Just checked the datasheet of the eMMC 5.1 used in my 2020 phone that I use daily now and it's MLC. It also has optional pseudo-SLC mode.
Aachen 4mo ago
Only the very cheapest phones still have eMMC. I bought a Pixel phone second hand last year and it shows the wear level of the storage somewhere in the settings. I forgot the number but it was so low, extrapolation got me to something crazy like maybe 20 or 50 years of expected use at that rate That consumer rate isn't datacentre use, but not every task is write-to-persistent-storage intensive. You can also replace the sdcard and write to that instead if this is a worry (that's what I've been doing on my phones since I use them quite intensively; maybe that's overkill nowadays idk)

mlinksva 4mo ago

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-will-happen-with-g https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/by-eoy-2030-what-wil...

saturn8601 4mo ago

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.

radu_floricica 4mo ago

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

jon-wood 4mo ago
Carbon is fungible right up until you make something out of it, at which point it’s really not without a significant effort. We can’t just take a mobile phone and decompose it back to its component atoms for reuse as something else, recycling is to some degree a myth, and to a greater degree incredibly energy demanding in itself to get things broken down to a level they can be turned into something new.

zx8080 4mo ago

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.

arjie 4mo ago

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!

shrubble 4mo ago

Google will do everything other than let you run stock Linux on a phone.

glaslong 4mo ago

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.

HotGarbage 4mo ago

> the mobile-oriented Android userspace must be replaced with a general-purpose Linux distro c'mon Google, release that shit.

forcer 4mo ago

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.

Flere-Imsaho 4mo ago
This is such a cool project. I run a Tor Snowflake node, so the of concept of enthusiasts contributing to a decentralised network interests me. However it does worry me that I've never heard of acurast... I consider myself pretty well read on the subject of decentralised projects, has it just not taken off?

filup 4mo ago

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.

nycerrrrrrrrrr 4mo ago

This idea has been around for a long time. See https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/presentation/shahrad https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/present..., also https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2009/papers/andersen-sosp09.pdf https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2009/papers/anders...

amelius 4mo ago

This would already exist ages ago if mobile computing was more open source friendly.

theendisney 4mo ago

Imagine you could buy some serial extendable base station and click all of your old phones in it. Applications could offload all kinds of tasks. You dont even need to invent useful applications the community will do it for you. But if you insist, think all kinds of cheap smart devices that offload the smart part.

llsf 4mo ago

Around 2015, I was working for a company that processed coupons for large retail stores. We had lots of performance issues, mostly due to our centralized database at the time. I was dreaming at the time to ship a mobile phone at every large store (e.g. Target) to process the data in-situ. It could hold its own database (partitioned for the tenant), it would have its own UPS (battery), and have enough CPU power to serve the POS requests of one store, even the largest ones. A mobile phone would be our on-prem server.

noisy_boy 4mo ago

It is ridiculous that I can pick up pretty much any average computer, install Linux on it and be on my way in an hour or so but have to go through so many hoops to do the same on Android and even then the results are mixed. We have been really shafted by the phone makers by the brainwashing that they are somehow extra special things. They are just computers with a radio in it. It is shameful.

awaisras 4mo ago

A google sponsored article mentioning t3.micro chef's kiss

agrijakhetarpal 4mo ago

[flagged]

fitsumbelay 4mo ago

hoped this would happen for a long time but knew it takes a Google sized momentum to make it happen. Formalizing the goal is great and brings it closer to reality

diimdeep 4mo ago

Computing platform with retired phones is not going to happen unless manufacturers add some budged for this to the motherboard design, expose high bandwidth interface similar to pci-e or usb4, we have now 80GB/s RAM phones with less than 1GB/s usb3 interfaces to the this beast computers, it is absurd.

Schlagbohrer 4mo ago

This "paper" doesn't really have anything in it, it's just a proposal with some unhelpful graphs. I wonder what they think is the novelty here. People with small budgets have been building compute clusters out of second-hand upcycled hardware for a long time.

Schlagbohrer 4mo ago

Is it still easy and cheap to get old, unwanted corporate laptops by the dozens? That seems a better way to go than locked-down-firmware phones

rishikeshs 4mo ago

> On average, people replace their phone every four years. This is generally driven by people’s desire for a new device, including for the functionalities provided by new models. This is so not true. I'm not replacing my phone because I want to. I'm replacing because your stupid updates break my phone and make it unusable. It's called Planned obsolescence

andai 4mo ago

SETI@phone

pvtmert 4mo ago

I guess the article is targeting regular people. However combining terms like "Linux distro" with other non technical explanations like "useless components such as screens, cameras, etc" sounded a bit weird to me. Also; For example, phones have a “low memory killer” daemon, which throttles memory-hungry applications. I mean, this is also needed for server applications, more-so than personal use. Reason being in fact a runaway process would interrupt many users rather than a single user in server versus client use cases respectively...

hulitu 4mo ago

Greeneashing by Google.