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E-waste is a very serious problem, and researchers have been studying how to reduce and reuse it Recycling old technology There has long been ancient recycling technology. Google Research and the University of California, San Diego have come up with a great way to address at least some of them.
The researchers used discarded 2,000 Google Pixel phones To create a small computing platform. Unlike Famous Taiwanese grandfather Who played Pokemon Go on 64 phones Old Pixels underwent extensive modifications before being placed in their new home. The motherboards were removed and placed in self-managing groups of 25 to 50 devices, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”. To study.
The motherboards’ Android operating systems were removed and replaced with Linux, removing many consumer-facing protections, such as a low memory killer function that helps phones run more smoothly, but would be unintuitive in a server context. Everything that was unnecessary, such as displays, camera arrays and batteries, was removed, leaving only the motherboards to do their job.
The Pixel’s server performance (blue bars) performed surprisingly well by benchmarks compared to the Asus server rack.
This setup was very successful. According to Google, the Pixels performed better or at least on par most of the time against professional server racks like Asus RS720Awhich is a popular choice for enterprise data centers. This made it applicable to the needs of UC San Diego, which included a small-scale cloud computing platform that could run applications for classrooms.
UC San Diego says 20 pixels was enough to support a classroom of more than 75 students, and with 2,000 pixels, they could support 100 classes simultaneously.
The big win for UC San Diego was cost. The price of the Pixel phones and the time it took to set them up were “a fraction of the usual cost” for a similar amount of server computing power. UC San Diego intends to study how long consumer electronics can last in a denser server environment and plans to launch the system in the fall 2026 semester.
A small solution to a big problem
Although it was small-scale, this experiment has legs when it comes to further use in academia. Google says the vast majority of school use, including teaching, grading and even research, is “within the hosting capabilities of a single smartphone.” If UC San Diego’s trial proves successful, colleges around the world could use old, discarded smartphones in similar server setups to help reduce costs.
However, this approach is not the next big thing in data center or server building. Data centers can Processing hundreds Gbps on the low end. Data centers for AI and other enterprise applications require larger, stronger, and more robust solutions, which brings with them a completely different set of environmental concerns, such as Ridiculous amount of water They need to stay calm and the fact that some data centers Use enough electricity To power tens of thousands of homes.
There’s no chance that a bunch of old smartphone motherboards will have an impact on the major data center industry, but it’s good to see it working on smaller scales, where companies and researchers alike are concerned. Often overpay To get cloud computing power when they don’t really need that much.
Drop in the bucket for electronic waste
It is commendable that researchers and companies are looking at ways to utilize e-waste, but they still have a long way to go. The 2,000-strong smartphone server farm created by UC San Diego removed a small portion of It is estimated at about 62 million tons Of the electronic waste that enters the garbage stream each year, only 22.3% is properly recycled. CNET Readers Doing better than averageold technology is recycled 39% of the time, but this is still a concern.
He appreciates 5.3 billion mobile phones They are disposed of every year. That means UC San Diego would need to create another 2.65 million server farms per year forever to clean it up completely. It is not expected that a single university will do this, but this shows how huge the problem of e-waste is. These numbers also do not take into account the large number of adults who… Keep old technology in the closetcollecting dust.
There are other initiatives that help in this matter. Right to repair laws in the United States are Slowly making it easier and more affordable To fix technology instead of just getting rid of it. Governments and Companies We are raising awareness of how to properly recycle e-waste so that those metals and chemicals can be reused instead of left to rot in a landfill somewhere.
If UC San Diego’s trial proves successful, this could be another step in a long line of small initiatives to help solve a problem that has been considered out of control for many years.
