A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

UC San Diego researchers, with Google's support, are building a "phone cluster computing" platform that repurposes retired smartphone motherboards into a low-carbon datacenter to reduce both electronic waste and manufacturing emissions. The project will deploy a datacenter made from 2,000 Pixel smartphones to provide cloud computing for researchers and students, leveraging the fact that modern smartphones' processing power rivals servers while their cores are extracted and clustered together. This approach addresses the significant embodied carbon footprint of hardware manufacturing by reusing devices that are replaced every four years on average but still retain functional computing capabilities.