Researchers Turn Old Junk Drawer Smartphones Into a Mini Cloud Computing Platform
Researchers from Google and UC San Diego have repurposed 2,000 discarded Pixel smartphones into a functional, low-cost cloud computing platform. By removing unnecessary hardware and installing Linux, the team created a server cluster that performs competitively with professional enterprise hardware.
Why it matters
This project demonstrates a sustainable and cost-effective method for managing e-waste while providing viable computing power for educational and research purposes.
E-waste is a pretty serious problem, and researchers have been studying how to reduce, reuse and recycle old tech as long as there has been old tech to recycle. Google Research and UC San Diego came up with a pretty cool way to deal with at least some of it.
The report is a straightforward technical summary of a research project without political or ideological framing.
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