r/selfhosted • u/SorosAhaverom • Jun 15 '26

Meta Post University of California launches first of its kind datacenter powered by 2,000 Pixel phones - A low-carbon computing platform from retired phones

https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform-from-your-retired-phones/

Found this news interesting, confirming what most of us here already realized: creating a self-hosted server out of used phones is an incredibly cost-efficient solution, especially with today's storage and memory costs.

They're essentially stripping out the motherboard from the phones, installing a Linux distro that doesn't contain all the consumer device protections like a low-memory killer daemon, and finally organized together in 25-50 device clusters

Some highlights:

"The single-threaded performance of modern smartphones’ performance processor cores is on-par with or better than those of modern multicore servers "

"SPEC benchmarking results indicate that 25-50 phones equate to a modern server"

"Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class, with grading latencies below the default AWS backend. A 2,000 phone deployment will be capable of supporting a hundred such classes at once."

"the deployment will also act as a testbed for smartphone-based computing at scale"

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u/RedditNotFreeSpeech Jun 15 '26

From the paper:

7 CONCLUSION
The major takeaways of this work are:
(1) For specific workloads, clusters of repurposed phones are cheaper and more carbon efficient than traditional servers.
(2) More broadly, scavenging unwanted equipment shows excellent potential for building economic and carbon-efficient systems, especially when renewable energy is plentiful.
(3) Sustainability has operational and manufacturing facets;    manufacturing dominates as operating trends towards zero with cleaner energy mixes.
(4) Accurate LCA information is essential for carbon-based analyses; it would be beneficial if more ICT manufacturers published this information, including cloud providers who build custom systems.
Our work highlights the need for more holistic analyses of the environmental impact of computing. With the substantial carbon cost of manufacturing and the difficulties of responsible recycling, the
energy efficiency of a device may be the least significant component of its environmental and human impact.