2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

You might say the system packs two kilapixels of compute Tobias Mann Tobias Mann Systems editor Published thu // UTC 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. However, it's a computer and, when combined with others like it, can offer real processing power. 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.  Google estimates that the average person upgrades their phone every four years or so. While the physical device and battery may show some wear and tear from their years of service, their core computing functionalities remain intact. “It's just a vast amount of sort of thrown away compute and recycling is a terrible option for most of these smartphones,” Kastner said, adding that Switzer started by building a couple of small clusters using smartphones to prove the concept. Since then, the project’s scale has grown considerably. According to the Chocolate Factory, the motherboard represents about 50 percent of the smartphone’s embodied carbon.  A lot of early testing used unmodified smartphones, Kastner noted, but as the team quickly learned, this wasn’t practical or safe. “In some early meetings with Google, their engineers said that, if you're going to put these in the datacenter, those batteries are no-go — a lot of things are a no-go — because they're just fire hazards,” he said. Some of this work was done by researchers, including Switzer and another UCSD computer science prof Patrick Pannuto, but for the full deployment this fall, Kastner said, Google is working with a third party to extract the phones' motherboards from their cases. Once the phone’s motherboards have been extracted from their shells, the researchers say that the chips hiding within remain more than potent enough to be useful for a variety of tasks.