Google is describing how unmodified consumer smartphones can be redeployed in a datacenter environment, but only after major hardware and software changes. The company says the phones must be stripped down to the motherboard, then updated from the mobile-oriented Android userspace to a general-purpose Linux distro so they can be managed like server hardware.
The source says the approach avoids the hazards of using complete phones in a datacenter, where display panels, batteries, chassis and peripheral hardware such as cameras are unnecessary and take up space. It also notes that some components, including batteries, contain materials not rated for a datacenter environment.
Google says the motherboard is the main target of the effort because it contains the core compute functionality and accounts for the largest fraction of embodied carbon, approximately 50% based on internal carbon footprinting assessments.
On the software side, the move from Android to Linux is meant to make the devices programmable for cloud use. It also turns off protections that are important for consumer devices but unnecessary in server settings. One example given is the “low memory killer” daemon, which throttles memory-hungry applications.
The source says the bigger orchestration challenge is scale: SPEC benchmarking results indicate that 25-50 phones equate to a modern server. To manage that, Google uses containerized applications managed by Kubernetes, with the phones organised into self-managing clusters of 25-50 devices.
Source: research.google.
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