How long do you keep and use your smartphone? An estimated two and a half years, on average. The battery dies or there’s this new improved model you just gotta have.
In the United States alone, an estimated 150 million smartphones are discarded every year. They may be thrown in the trash or, more likely, stashed in a drawer where they might languish for years.
“But typically the processor is still totally fine,” said Jennifer Switzer, a Ph.D. student in computer science at UC San Diego. “So people are getting rid of these devices every couple of years or so and they still have a powerful processor within them,”
And that processor is the part that UCSD computer scientists want to repurpose.
Switzer and her colleagues think they’ve found a way to put an old smartphone’s processing power into cloud computing or in a company data center. Switzer said the hardware in these smartphones can run perfectly well for at least six years.
“So if we can collect up old unwanted phones and redeploy them in, for instance, a data center, then we would reduce the number of new hardware that we need to build,” Switzer said.
Currently, smartphones can be recycled, in a sense. But UCSD researchers said the goal of extracting precious metals like copper and silver from them is difficult, and renders very little return.
Switzer was lead author of a UCSD study that was published as part of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), a computer science conference this year in Vancouver, Canada. It analyzed carbon energy costs of creating new computer hardware, which Switzer said are considerable and should be avoided.
Building a smartphone data center
The researchers needed to get a bunch of unwanted phones before they could try to turn them into little data centers. Coauthor of the study, and fellow UCSD computer scientist, Gabriel Marcano said Switzer had a plan.
“Jen had a donation drive, effectively. Where she asked for donations from anyone on campus. If they had old phones lying around in a drawer, to please give them to her. She had a little box in front of her office and we got a lot of phones that way,” Marcano said.
Then the work began, assembling phones together so their processors could work on the same operating system. They called them "phone clusters" but in the lab they looked more like a smartphone toast rack, or maybe a phone sandwich.
“One of the coolest things about this is that a phone, in its way, is already a data center in a box,” said Pat Pannuto, a UCSD computer science professor and Switzer’s advisor.
Pannuto said he and the research team have proven that smartphone processors can be linked and can operate like a data center. The researchers hosted a web page with one of them, for instance.
He said these assembled devices wouldn’t be a consumer product. But they could enhance the power of data centers, expand and decentralize the cloud. Possible clients for such a product would include companies like Google.
“We have done n=10 phones in the lab. We’ve created a ten-phone cluster. We’ve proven it works. We’ve proven you can distribute jobs across it,” Pannuto said. “Now we want to go n=100, n=1,000, n=2,000 and say, ‘What happens if we start to run real workloads? What if we’re doing things that support actual commercial interests?’”
He said after it’s shown that this smartphone repurposing plan can scale up, the idea needs to be presented to potential industry partners.
“Come ask us again in a year, and we’ll tell you how that worked out,” he said.
And if you have an old smartphone slumbering in a drawer at home, it may have a future life.
