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A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones
- m1333 3mo agoEMMC 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 3mo agoA 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 3mo agoPhone 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 3mo agoJust 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 3mo agoOnly 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)
- radu_floricica 3mo 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 3mo agoCarbon 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.
- fitsumbelay 3mo agohoped 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
- hulitu 3mo agoGreeneashing by Google.
- shrubble 3mo agoGoogle will do everything other than let you run stock Linux on a phone.
- rbanffy 3mo agoSpeaking 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.
- zipy124 3mo agoThis 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...
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoWhich consumer ever cares about "security" updates on phones?
- Aachen 3mo agoSome 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 3mo agoPeople 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?
- RetroTechie 3mo agoObviously 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.
- mhd 3mo agoBeowulf cluster time for old Pixels?
- maz1b 3mo agoI'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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoIsn'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)
- croes 3mo agothe requirement could be when the hardware reaches EOL unlock the bootloader
- lucb1e 3mo agoAlso for microwaves and dishwashers? That's more the problem I struggle to solve: how to differentiate things that you want to run your own OS on from the things that it would be historically silly to have to provide connectivity and unlocking interfaces for (On the other hand, our stupid 2026 dishwasher has no flushing program and leaves a ton of residue on the dishes. The 2001 model we inherited from the landlord was perfect, barely used any more power or water but the dishes were actually dry at the end and you could eat from them without ingesting detergent. I wouldn't mind inserting a little rinse cycle in the eco program if there were some documented way of talking to the chip, then for drying we can just let them sit in the opened machine for the remaining 20 hours of the day. Alas. Maybe I should want open source everything!) Also, what's EOL? When it goes out of warranty after 2 years?
- christophilus 3mo agoWell, 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoDo 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 3mo agoThere are recycling and trade-in programs that could collect compatible phones and pass them on in bulk.
- jstanley 3mo agoThey'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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoThe article mentions the Pixel Fold. I suspect Google possesses every Pixel Fold ever made.
- david_allison 3mo agoI have a large amount, some are occasionally useful when debugging.
- nosioptar 3mo agoI did before the switch to volte. I recycled them wheb carriers decided to block a bunch of phones.
- denysvitali 3mo agoSounds 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 3mo agoSometimes 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 3mo agoBook of Eli has vibes along those lines
- GCUMstlyHarmls 3mo agoPump 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 3mo agoChiming 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 3mo agoBesides published material, Cuba comes close. Kept frozen in time by eternal restrictive sanctions.
- guestbest 3mo agoYou don’t think the country is mismanaged?
- bshacklett 3mo ago
- tetris11 3mo agoCtrl+F PostmarketOS. No? No, apparently.
- Zambyte 3mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516656 This earlier comment referenced it :)
- dzonga 3mo agoin 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 3mo ago[flagged]
- Havoc 3mo agoIs be more enthusiastic about this if one could remove the batteries. Dealing with spicy pillows is a pain
- nosioptar 3mo agoAside from bootloaders, this is the only thing stopping me from using old devices for cool stuff.
- jon-wood 3mo agoThey 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 3mo agoSomewhat 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 3mo ago[flagged]
- xnx 3mo 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 3mo agoMaps 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 3mo agoThis 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 3mo agoReally interesting project. Do you have a link to a writeup/paper?
- wky 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoI'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 3mo agoYeah, I think the intention matters here. There might even be a whole business to be created from this.
- Elfener 3mo agoVery 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 3mo 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 3mo agoIf 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 3mo agoYou 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 3mo agoThere 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 3mo ago
- yjftsjthsd-h 3mo agoSo did they just make a cloud out of computers that can't run a current kernel? That seems like a pretty big caveat
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo agoI 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 3mo 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 3mo agoIf only the phones could run a real Linux, let us bring our normal payloads of tools & scripts!
- seba_dos1 3mo agoI'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 3mo agoMe too, but surely you also notice they're slowly raising the temperature of the pot we're in?
- seba_dos1 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoIt’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 3mo agoProducing 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 3mo 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoThis 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.
- mlinksva 3mo agoCool 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 3mo agoI 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.
- zx8080 3mo agoAnd 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 3mo agoA 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!
- glaslong 3mo agoLove 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 3mo ago> the mobile-oriented Android userspace must be replaced with a general-purpose Linux distro c'mon Google, release that shit.
- forcer 3mo agoYou 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 3mo agoThis 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 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoThis 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 3mo agoThis would already exist ages ago if mobile computing was more open source friendly.
- theendisney 3mo agoImagine 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 3mo agoAround 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 3mo agoIt 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 3mo agoA google sponsored article mentioning t3.micro chef's kiss
- agrijakhetarpal 3mo ago[flagged]
- diimdeep 3mo agoComputing 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 3mo agoThis "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 3mo agoIs 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 3mo 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 3mo agoSETI@phone
- pvtmert 3mo agoI 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...