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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

#61

Post by daurnimator »

edwhitesell wrote: post #55
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…

What is the company/product? I'm curious about an all-in-one solution as I already do this with an extra Mikrotik router and things like pi-hole or OpenDNS. Currently a mAP [0], but there are more inexpensive options. [0] https://mikrotik.com/product/RBmAP2nD

Why a mAP vs a mAP lite?

How are you powering your mAP when out and about?

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

#62

Post by edwhitesell »

daurnimator wrote: post #61
edwhitesell wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the company/product? I'm curious about an all-in-one solution as I already do this with an extra Mikrotik router and things like pi-hole or OpenDNS. Currently a mAP [0], but there are more inexpensive options. [0] https://mikrotik.com/product/RBmAP2nD

Why a mAP vs a mAP lite? How are you powering your mAP when out and about?

The mAP is just what I have laying around, it's small and usually in my bag anyway. Plus, it has 2 ethernet ports so I can use it as a router/AP in a wired environment too.

To power it I use a microUSB cable to my laptop, or a phone charger, or a battery pack with the microUSB cable.

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

#63

Post by morganvachon »

nine_k wrote: post #57
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 suspect certain games, like Ingress, or GPU-intensive games, routinely max out phones' computing hardware. Chances are that badly overheating models are reasonably few and already known by gamers.

My experience with Ingress back in the day bears this out. That game would cause certain phones to reboot due to overheating, and others to throttle down so low they were worthless for playing.

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

#64

Post by everheardofc »

nine_k wrote: post #57
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 suspect certain games, like Ingress, or GPU-intensive games, routinely max out phones' computing hardware. Chances are that badly overheating models are reasonably few and already known by gamers.

Yeah except you're not going to reverse engineer the GPUs of a dozen SoCs just to save a few dollars on a beowulf cluster. Even in the best case you will reverse engineer one commonly used GPU and then pick phones based on that.

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

#65

Post by fragmede »

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.

Which security patches?

The slides are light on details, but if I were doing this, the phones would not be running Android in any case, so while security is an important consideration, you can't just say "but security!" and toss out the baby and the bath water.

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

#67

Post by fragmede »

salad77 wrote: post #7

Isn't this the storyline to HBO's Silicon Valley ? Someone took it seriously?

The original paper for FAWN: Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes came out of CMU back in 2009; HBO's Silicon Valley has no monopoly over the level of idea which would fit in a tweet.

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

#68

Post by everheardofc »

I used to make a joke that phones will be the future in datacenters because nobody is designing ARM SoCs for servers and those that do made them perform worse than phones.

The paper completely ignores the lack of ECC, hardware reliability and lack of software support. Especially if you consider that the majority of mobile gpus don't stupport opencl or don't even have drivers available for modern kernels. You will need to support your software for each device type or rewrite your software as an android app. But since developer and sysadmin time is far more valuable you're better of just buying an x86 server.

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

#69

Post by everheardofc »

kbenson wrote: post #38
justin66 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an individual, RPi is cheaper if your time is worth anything at all. On the other hand, if enough devices of the same type become available for this purpose it might make sense for a business to do this at scale.

> For an individual, RPi is cheaper if your time is worth anything at all. The only reason that's true is because groups have catered to the device and have ready-to-go instructions. Were the same effort put into making Samsung S2/S3/S4 etc phones easily converted, I'm not sure the time difference would be all that much at all.

But you don't have to support only S2/S3/S4 if that were the case then it'd be easy. The paper mentioned comparing 350 different devices. Groups can't gather if they are spread out across hundreds of devices. Not to mention that the userbase for user hostile devices isn't that big if there are user friendly alternatives.

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

#70

Post by icebraining »

fragmede wrote: post #65
icebraining wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which security patches? The slides are light on details, but if I were doing this, the phones would not be running Android in any case, so while security is an important consideration, you can't just say "but security!" and toss out the baby and the bath water.

What would they be running? Which other OS supports all thousands of models of SoCs, with the necessary drivers to do everything described?
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