E-waste is a massive environmental problem. So are current data center plans, if recent reports are to be believed. However, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have come up with an intriguing idea: They plan to use 2,000 Google Pixel smartphones to build a cloud computing data center with already-existing tech.
According to a Google Research blog post, on average, people replace their smartphones every four years (via Hothardware). However, many modern (yet outdated, in terms of our constant desire for shiny new things) examples have processors, memory, and storage chips that are relatively powerful, particularly when you chain them together.
That’s wasted hardware, and an ecological concern when you think of the extra carbon emissions created by manufacturing their replacements. By putting the existing chips to good use, it prevents them from going to landfill—and might even negate the need for new hardware in certain applications.
The post’s authors say that the single-threaded performance of a modern smartphone’s processor cores is on par with (or better than) many multicore server chips. However, modern servers are made up of dozens of multithreaded processor cores with access to a huge amount of memory, whereas a typical older smartphone only has a handful of cores and around 8-12 GB to play with.
Not only that, but recycled smartphones have a lot of extra components that would be inefficient (or hazardous) to deploy en masse, like the batteries and displays.
So, the first step is to remove everything but the motherboard and the attached chips (which represent the most embodied carbon of all the components), before chaining them together to create a server cluster for university usage, targeting relatively lightweight applications.
The phones are orchestrated together by Kubernetes, an open-source system for managing containerized applications. Each has a Linux distro installed, bypassing Android systems that wouldn’t be suitable for mass-server deployment, like memory-saving features.
While the current iteration seems to be pretty small-scale, the eventual 2,000-phone data center is planned to be used for grading and research applications within the universities’ existing software infrastructure.
“Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class, with grading latencies below the default AWS backend,” say the researchers. “A 2,000 phone deployment will be capable of supporting a hundred such classes at once.”
The post’s authors say that Google will be supporting the project, and that the aim is to provide “hundreds of researchers and students with low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing, reducing the need for newly manufactured hardware and their associated emissions.”
Which is such a neat idea, I’d like to see more officially supported projects like it in future. In my own home, I can think of at least five smartphones sitting in drawers doing absolutely nothing, all of which contain chips that could be used for something useful.
And while plugging them back in would of course lead to unused chips drawing power from the grid once more, I suppose it beats them being trampled by bulldozers at my local dump at some point in the future. Although it must be said, I doubt this work will do much to offset the ecological concerns around Google’s own huge data center plans in the near future.
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