Post #3365030

researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a pathway for the second life of phones through the exploration of “phone cluster computing.” This is a process whereby the motherboards of retired smartphones are extracted, collected into clusters, and redeployed as a general-purpose computing platform. With Google’s support, the university plans to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones that will provide hundreds of researchers and students with low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing, reducing the need for newly-manufactured hardware and their associated emissions. Well, it’s better than nothing. I presume these are trade-in phones. And it means that in this era of memory scarcity, existing memory is being reused instead of scrapped AND new memory isn’t being earmarked for these data center deployments. However, this appears to currently be a one-off publicity deployment, not a go-to strategy.