Live data from Hacker News

Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

usenix.org

1–10 of 73 posts

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

#5
post #2

The problem with these devices are that they are often locked down, and even unlocked/hacked open getting them to run anything like mainline Linux is hard-ish.

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...

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

#6
post #3

Imagine those on the attic, connected to a internet connection, forming a mesh-net with all houses nearby- and activated if distributed computation power is needed. Converting abundant power into computation.

Running on solar, perhaps? Free computation when the sun shines!

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

#9
Add a factor of two to the material costs, because without ECC, on a large scale you will have errors, so you need to double check every result. Now add some more to their TCO because they don't take MTBF into account. Suddenly the numbers do not look good anymore.

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

#10
post #2

The problem with these devices are that they are often locked down, and even unlocked/hacked open getting them to run anything like mainline Linux is hard-ish.

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.
Post reply on HN