♻️ With support from Google, Researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a useful second-life for consumer smartphones.

The carbon footprint of computing comes from two main sources: operational carbon, generated by energy use during operation, and embodied carbon, produced during hardware manufacturing. While operational emissions can be reduced through energy efficiency and clean energy, cutting manufacturing-related emissions is more challenging.

To address this, researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a pathway for the second life of phones through the exploration of “phone cluster computing.” This is a process whereby the motherboards of retired smartphones are extracted, collected into clusters, and redeployed as a general-purpose computing platform.

The study revealed that smartphones from just three years ago still deliver a higher single-core performance. With Google’s support, the university plans to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones that will provide hundreds of researchers and students with low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing, reducing the need for newly-manufactured hardware and their associated emissions.

@QSIMedia