A great new lease of life for your old smartphone? Google teams up with university researchers to create low-cost data…
- Old Pixel phones are being rebuilt into low-cost computing clusters
- Researchers stripped smartphones down to motherboards and deployed Linux
- Twenty retired phones can support applications used by 75 students
Millions of discarded smartphones are added to the global electronic waste stream every year despite retaining substantial computing capability.
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have now partnered with Google to investigate whether retired Pixel devices can be repurposed for practical computing workloads.
The project aims to reduce waste while easing some demand for new hardware used in smaller-scale data centers.
Researchers turn retired smartphones into computing clusters
Google Research says retired mobile devices contribute to the embodied carbon associated with manufacturing and the broader environmental cost of consumer electronics.
Rather than allowing those devices to remain unused, the research team converted older Pixel smartphones into what it describes as a general-purpose computing platform.
The approach involves removing...
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