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