Google · Intel · California · TikTok · The Register
Early benchmarking using the SPEC suite suggests that 25-50 phones should deliver performance similar to that of a conventional
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The major challenge, instead, is distributing workloads across multiple devices, each of which has a handful of cores of one or more varieties, and most have 8-12 GB of memory.
Key facts
- Early benchmarking using the SPEC suite suggests that 25-50 phones should deliver performance similar to that of a conventional server
- More recently, they came across a tiny cluster developed by Gigabyte that packed 40 Intel Lunar Lake notebook processors, each with eight cores and 32 GB of memory, into a system the size of a pizza box
- The second is using Kubernetes to orchestrate container deployments across clusters of 25-50 phones
- In particular, UCSD will be using 2,000 Pixel Fold smartphones courtesy of Google
Summary
Once you're done with your smartphone, it either ends up in a drawer, on the growing second-hand market, or perhaps in a recycle bin. Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, working in collaboration with Google, plan to deploy a rather unusual compute cluster built not from conventional servers, but using 2,000 retired phones. The goal is to demonstrate how these devices might continue to serve as a low-cost, low-carbon computing platform after their original owners have abandoned them for a shiny new widget to doomscroll TikTok on. “The project was the brainchild of Jennifer Switzer, a former PhD student at UCSD who is now working on a post-doc at Google,” Ryan Kastner, an associate professor of computer science at UCSD, told El Reg. In particular, UCSD will be using 2,000 Pixel Fold smartphones courtesy of Google.