Thoroughly bonkers upcoming ASPLOS paper from some UCSD folks: making competitive cloud servers out of old Android phones they bought on eBay. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3575693.3575710
>We show that the capabilities of even decade-old smartphones
>We develop a cloudlet of reused Pixel 3A phones.
Uh year 4 years surely isn't new but it isn't a decade either
@eloy @adrian The bigger issue I have with this approach is that Pixels are kind of... the easy and obvious one. They're widely supported by custom ROMs and easy to flash.
The real problem is how to repurpose all the *other* discarded devices at scale, the ones which don't have such a happy path, where people haven't known (and practiced) how to repurpose them for years already.
@eloy @adrian (On which note, old Pixels tend to be in high demand already for this reason, so this particular approach is not likely to scale beyond a few small deployments)