Google Turns Thousands Of Pixel Phones Into A Low-Carbon Data Center
Nothing like some positive news to start out the week: In search for a solution to counter the massive carbon footprint of data centers, researchers at the University of California San Diego, with support from Google, are giving retired smartphones a second life as general-purpose cloud computing servers, rather than buying new expensive hardware.
On average, consumers swap out their smartphones every four years. The thing is, many of these discarded devices still possess core internal components that remain robust. In fact, benchmark testing reveals a surprising fact: processors inside smartphones from just three years ago frequently deliver single-core performance that equals or beats traditional, high-end multi-core data center servers. Although a smartphone lacks the vast memory capacity and dozens of simultaneous multi-threaded cores found in a standard server rack, its raw per-core computing power can be incredibly potent.
To tap into this dormant potential, UCSD researchers stripped the retired...
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