HN Gopher Feed (2017-08-25) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute
nodes
102 points by blacksmythe
https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/presentatio...___________________________________________________________________
amelius - 5 hours ago
How does "FLOP per Joule" compare between such devices and an
average desktop PC?
druidcz - 4 hours ago
Skimming through the article, I think it does not include cost of
labor. In a developed country, my guess is that the cost to have a
human worker collect, clean, setup, connect, etc. all the 84 phones
would be actually higher than buying a new server.In third world
countries, this could be a different story. I would be happy to
send my old phones to Africa to be used at schools.
HateInAPuddle - 4 hours ago
It would more likely end up in a place like this,
though.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agbogbloshie
mrmrcoleman - 1 hours ago
At a previous company we had a 'farm' of test phones that we used
for testing new versions of software. A large number of those test
were 'stress testing' which would probably be analogous to the sort
of load you would have it they were to be treated as a
'datacenter'.Based on that I'm pretty sure that the biggest issue
with managing the cluster would be the extremely high failure
rate.That's not to say that this won't work because I haven't done
the maths, but it kid a unique challenge.
TheAceOfHearts - 1 hours ago
It seems like you'd encounter so many challenges in taking this
path, although I think it's awesome that people are seriously
looking into this.One point that they article doesn't mention is
that mobile devices don't have ECC RAM. I'm not very familiarized
with the server space, but I thought that was pretty much a
standard requirement? e.g. If you're providing IaaS, isn't the risk
of falling prey to rowhammer attacks a serious concern?What I'd
love to see is something similar but for home users. Instead of
continuing to push stuff into third-party services, you can hook up
a mix of devices to run services and applications from home. Bring
back the distributed internet dream! Most home services don't need
tons of power or high availability. The biggest risk is probably
with handling data backups, which you can easily solve by
encrypting assets and pushing em up to some cloud provider.
ori_b - 1 hours ago
> If you're providing IaaS, isn't the risk of falling prey to
rowhammer attacks a serious concern?Just don't share devices.
They probably don't have worthwhile virtualization anyways.A
bigger problem is that the hardware is shit. Both from a
reliability perspective, and from a performance perspective. I
just don't think there's a market for this.
subway - 5 hours ago
Amazing little blackthrows too. Or so I've heard.You can usually
find a rootable phone in Walmart for about $15.
anotherbrownguy - 4 hours ago
But why buy it over a comparatively cheap single board computer?
subway - 3 hours ago
It's pretty difficult to anonymously buy an SBC with cash.
wott - 3 hours ago
Battery backup?
9t3h4r3o5w1a4w2 - 6 hours ago
I have at least 4 Android phones that have either a broken screen
(but still usable) or are just too old to run a recent version of
Android. Anybody knows how can I use them as computers or even
servers? how to connect them to the network without using wifi?
they obviously don't come with a network port.
kbenson - 6 hours ago
A USB to ethernet adapter will probably work for a wired
connection.[1]Gambiting mentioned elsewhere in the comments that
you can install GNURoot from the Play store and run Linux along
side Android.I imagine there is, or soon will be, specific
projects to pare down AOSP to the minimum required to run a
server without all the extra stuff (that is, the Android part on
top of Linux).1: http://plugable.com/2015/01/22/new-plugable-usb-
fast-etherne...
notswiley - 6 hours ago
If you plug them into a Linux machine and turn on tethering they
will show up as the ethernet interface usbx or so. You can then
use dhclient to get an address (although you'll want to make sure
it doesn't change your default gateway) or assign a reasonable
address yourself.Terminal IDE (on old phones) or termux on new
ones should have enough packages to do whatever you want.You can
also grab any rootfs with the right arch and chroot into it if
you have root. You can even static link busybox/dropbear and have
most of the things you would use on a small server.
seanalltogether - 5 hours ago
This sounds like a good rasberrypi project. A ways to plug in
multiple android phones through usb and get access to the
processing power and filesystem offered by the phone in a generic
clustered configuration.
feelin_googley - 3 hours ago
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 location where the user can "trust" the
network.The pocket-sized router runs open source software chosen
and installed by the user. Users have a generous choice of
operating systems, from Plan9 to BSD to Linux, as they do for the
RPi. Baseband is either absent or physically disabled.The main
advantage I see to leveraging old "phones" for this is the power
supply.While I have seen small form factor routers made for travel,
they are generally not rechargeable.
CyberDildonics - 2 hours ago
Why wouldn't someone just do that through the software on their
phone?
VectorLock - 20 minutes ago
Because then they can't sell you a $X00 raspberry pizerow
pjc50 - 41 minutes ago
Hard to do without root/jailbreak.
toast0 - 2 hours ago
I'm not sure they really did a good comparison here. Cost comparing
an 8-socket system with 2 cpus installed buying new vs buying
broken phones on ebay isn't really fair. If I were going to for
cheap compute, I'd look for used (or otherwise discounted)
chromeboxes. No distributed UPS, but small and gigabit ethernet,
reasonably current intel processors for good IPC, not terribly
large.
pm215 - 3 hours ago
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 devices into your 'cluster' (figuring
out how to root them, identifying how to network them, rigging up
some kind of custom rack-mounting hardware, etc). And there'd be a
bigger turnover of 'replace expired device' than with fewer newer
designed-for-server nodes.The paper also suggests running a
hypervisor on these, but I suspect you'd find that firmware/boot
rom locks you out of EL2 (hypervisor mode) on most hardware.
otp124 - 3 hours ago
> 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 issuesInteresting
data points. Have any of these folks written a blog article on
the subject?
happycube - 2 hours ago
Yup - and Linaro a few years ago wound up hacking up Saumsung
Chromebooks to use for ARM buildfarms:
http://systemcall.eu/blog/blog/2014/06/05/trashing-chromeboo...
heisenbit - 4 hours ago
In practice so far new CPUs were much more power efficient than
older ones - so much that this approach makes little sense but ....
it is worth noting that one of the reasons this might remotely work
is on slide 7: Diminishing growth CPU performance / end of Moore's
Law. I'm fairly optimistic about the 10nm node still providing a
power saving boost but in the long run this sort of thinking could
interesting.
tammer - 12 minutes ago
I saw a talk at my university by a prolific robotics engineer who
explained that for small drones designed to work by swarming &
collaborating, it is much more cost effective to use old Samsung
Galaxy phones as the "brain" of a drone platform rather than
integrating standalone CPU's. As far as I know they still use this
as their primary design strategy.
tpolzer - 6 hours ago
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.
josteink - 7 hours ago
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.
gambiting - 6 hours ago
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...
dokument - 6 hours ago
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.
notswiley - 5 hours ago
Android kills stuff when it feels like it wants more room to
cache apps in ram. The background stuff like the media
indexer takes CPU time and generates heat (these are pretty
easy to overheat when used like this.) I think some of the
older android userspace even has flaws exploitable over the
network. etc.
skykooler - 2 hours ago
RAM and CPU usage are higher, because you're essentially
running two OS's at the same time.
notswiley - 6 hours ago
A lot of them can be used just fine as a server with a fairly
open OS. It's usually the GPU/camera/radios etc. that need
special stuff, but things like USB (for networking) and flash
work fine.It's not even that hard to set up, go grab the kernel
(some of qualcomm's kernels have these super crappy buildscripts
that need python 2.x), build it, throw in busybox and dropbear,
fastboot the image and you're good to go.
welder - 5 hours ago
Would love to see a community like Rasberry Pi for linux on old
phones! Maybe that already exists?
fabrice_d - 4 hours ago
yes: https://www.postmarketos.org/
Pica_soO - 7 hours ago
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.
gbrown - 7 hours ago
Or botnets
sevensor - 6 hours ago
Running on solar, perhaps? Free computation when the sun shines!
notswiley - 5 hours ago
I don't know about you, but my old phones struggle with room
tempurature air, I'd hate to see how they do in an attic. That
with the battery (most can't run without one because of spikes in
the current draw) is a bit of a fire hazard.
stephengillie - 5 hours ago
Imagine a mobile web server. For events, geocaching, emergency
services, and other on-demand situations. It could serve local
wifi to serve its pages.
randomerr - 2 hours ago
There a bunch of LAMP apps on Android. You just need a phone
that open enough to let you 'share' a connections. Otherwise
you would just be better off with RPi setup as an access point.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esminis.se...
kbenson - 6 hours ago
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).
justin66 - 4 hours ago
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.
kbenson - 2 hours ago
> 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.
jacobush - 9 minutes ago
If only
icebraining - 2 hours ago
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.
kbenson - 2 hours ago
That's true. There may be some help with the new Android HAL
stuff, but the older phones are probably out of luck because
the chipsets might be obsolete and thus not need new drivers to
be released for them.That said, RPi still has one or two binary
blob driver holdouts as well, but I agree there is a world of
difference between them in this respect.
salad77 - 6 hours ago
Isn't this the storyline to HBO's Silicon Valley ? Someone took it
seriously?
godzillabrennus - 5 hours ago
Now we just need some phones to blow up while people are using
them.
elcapitan - 6 hours ago
It's the new Internet!
AceJohnny2 - 5 hours ago
This was a establishing plot point in Rudy Rucker's short story
Hormiga Canyon, published in Asimov's August 2007 issue. He also
included the benefit of voice recognition on any node :)You can
read it here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestor
ies/#_T...(warning: Rudy's stories are... zany)
jacquesm - 5 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_and_the_AntsIs a good
one too.
eveningcoffee - 3 hours ago
The question is can you trust these devices?