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Researchers recycle old phones and cluster them into ‘computing platforms’ that operate as a low-cost data center
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Researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) collaborated with Google to recycle “old” Pixel smartphones and give them a second life as a low-cost data center.
Key facts
- NASA even repurposed the Qualcomm 801 SoC, a mid-range chip from 2014 and found in the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, to help the Perseverance rover find its way around the Red Planet like some sort
- Benchmarking results revealed that 25 to 50 old phones wereequal to the computing power of a single dual-socket server-class CPU
- UCSD determined that a 20-phone cluster can support one application that a 75+ student class requires
- According to Google Research, retired smartphones are part of the “embodied carbon” that is associated with manufacturing and its carbon footprint
Summary
The study revealed that smartphones from three years ago still deliver a higher single-core performance compared to servers like the Asus RS720A-E11, which can be equipped with Nvidia H200 or Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPUs and two AMD EPYC server processors, that you frequently find in the most powerful data centers. The first thing they did was to strip these gadgets of non-essential components, displays, batteries, cameras, speakers, chassis, etc. Only the motherboard remains, as it plays host to the SoC needed for running compute. UCSD determined that a 20-phone cluster can support one application that a 75+ student class requires.