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Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

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Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#41

Post by happycube »

otp124 wrote: post #37
pm215 wrote: post #36

Interesting idea, but I suspect if you tried it you'd quickly run into practical limitations. I know people who've tried running build farms with "development board" hardware have found that the stress of 24x7 100% compute hits kernel bugs or overheating issues that 'normal use' doesn't, and I suspect mobile phones would be similar. The pace of phone evolution means you'd have an ongoing effort to get new kinds of de…

> I know people who've tried running build farms with "development board" hardware have found that the stress of 24x7 100% compute hits kernel bugs or overheating issues Interesting data points. Have any of these folks written a blog article on the subject?

Yup - and Linaro a few years ago wound up hacking up Saumsung Chromebooks to use for ARM buildfarms: http://systemcall.eu/blog/blog/2014/06/05/trashing-chromeboo...

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#42

Post by toast0 »

I'm not sure they really did a good comparison here. Cost comparing an 8-socket system with 2 cpus installed buying new vs buying broken phones on ebay isn't really fair. If I were going to for cheap compute, I'd look for used (or otherwise discounted) chromeboxes. No distributed UPS, but small and gigabit ethernet, reasonably current intel processors for good IPC, not terribly large.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#43

Post by icebraining »

kbenson wrote: post #11

Well, the cost of a raspberry Pi for a home server is actually quite high when compared to using the busted or obsolete phone gathering dust in your drawer. Since there are probably millions of these, why not recycle into cheap servers given the benefits of their low power use (and the possible ability to draw power to charge during cheap periods and run off battery during expensive ones).

At least with a Pi you can install the latest security patches. Of those millions of phones, many are simply locked, and even the others very often don't have drivers compatible with the newer kernels.

Becoming a node on a botnet to save $5 is not very attractive.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#44

Post by skykooler »

dokument wrote: post #10
gambiting wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use GNURoot to install any linux onto any android device - it just runs alongside Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=champion.gnuro...

What is the real downside of that vs replacing android with linux? I could see there being more pro's than cons except for specific use cases.

RAM and CPU usage are higher, because you're essentially running two OS's at the same time.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#45

Post by kbenson »

icebraining wrote: post #43
kbenson wrote: post #11

Well, the cost of a raspberry Pi for a home server is actually quite high when compared to using the busted or obsolete phone gathering dust in your drawer. Since there are probably millions of these, why not recycle into cheap servers given the benefits of their low power use (and the possible ability to draw power to charge during cheap periods and run off battery during expensive ones).

At least with a Pi you can install the latest security patches. Of those millions of phones, many are simply locked, and even the others very often don't have drivers compatible with the newer kernels. Becoming a node on a botnet to save $5 is not very attractive.

That's true. There may be some help with the new Android HAL stuff, but the older phones are probably out of luck because the chipsets might be obsolete and thus not need new drivers to be released for them.

That said, RPi still has one or two binary blob driver holdouts as well, but I agree there is a world of difference between them in this respect.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#46

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

It seems like you'd encounter so many challenges in taking this path, although I think it's awesome that people are seriously looking into this.

One point that they article doesn't mention is that mobile devices don't have ECC RAM. I'm not very familiarized with the server space, but I thought that was pretty much a standard requirement? e.g. If you're providing IaaS, isn't the risk of falling prey to rowhammer attacks a serious concern?

What I'd love to see is something similar but for home users. Instead of continuing to push stuff into third-party services, you can hook up a mix of devices to run services and applications from home. Bring back the distributed internet dream! Most home services don't need tons of power or high availability. The biggest risk is probably with handling data backups, which you can easily solve by encrypting assets and pushing em up to some cloud provider.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#47

Post by ori_b »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #46

It seems like you'd encounter so many challenges in taking this path, although I think it's awesome that people are seriously looking into this. One point that they article doesn't mention is that mobile devices don't have ECC RAM. I'm not very familiarized with the server space, but I thought that was pretty much a standard requirement? e.g. If you're providing IaaS, isn't the risk of falling prey to rowhammer attac…

> If you're providing IaaS, isn't the risk of falling prey to rowhammer attacks a serious concern?

Just don't share devices. They probably don't have worthwhile virtualization anyways.

A bigger problem is that the hardware is shit. Both from a reliability perspective, and from a performance perspective. I just don't think there's a market for this.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#48

Post by mrmrcoleman »

At a previous company we had a 'farm' of test phones that we used for testing new versions of software. A large number of those test were 'stress testing' which would probably be analogous to the sort of load you would have it they were to be treated as a 'datacenter'.

Based on that I'm pretty sure that the biggest issue with managing the cluster would be the extremely high failure rate.

That's not to say that this won't work because I haven't done the maths, but it kid a unique challenge.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#49

Post by pjc50 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #40
feelin_googley wrote: post #33

My company is working on pocket-sized routers/firewalls/DNS servers. These sit between the "smartphone" and the untrusted, e.g., public, wifi router, acting as a user-controlled gateway. The user makes a one-time change to the settings on their smartphone to use the user-controlled gateway. This enables blocking ads and other unwanted outgoing connections without having to be physically at home or work, i.e. in a loc…

Why wouldn't someone just do that through the software on their phone?

Hard to do without root/jailbreak.

Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

#50

Post by VectorLock »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #40
feelin_googley wrote: post #33

My company is working on pocket-sized routers/firewalls/DNS servers. These sit between the "smartphone" and the untrusted, e.g., public, wifi router, acting as a user-controlled gateway. The user makes a one-time change to the settings on their smartphone to use the user-controlled gateway. This enables blocking ads and other unwanted outgoing connections without having to be physically at home or work, i.e. in a loc…

Why wouldn't someone just do that through the software on their phone?

Because then they can't sell you a $X00 raspberry pizerow
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