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Ask HN: Is anyone doing a mobile phones server farm in the style of Amazon?

by neilxdsouza on 6/23/15, 7:31 AM with 14 comments

• by mryan on 6/23/15, 8:24 AM

  > How would these compare to an Amazon micro compute unit

  Poorly.

  Do you mean a Beowulf cluster of mobile phones? It seems like it would be woefully inefficient to say the least.

  - each node in the cluster has an expensive screen attached to it, which would presumably be permanently disabled to reduce cooling/power costs. This is a waste of money. Same goes for bluetooth, accelerometers and anything else that is not directly contributing to the cluster. The cost of the screen etc. could have purchased more processors instead.

  - temperature management would be incredibly inefficient. How would you cool a rack of 1000 phones/tablets? Server chassis are designed with this in mind. Phones/tablets are not.

  It's an interesting idea to think about, but nobody is going to produce a cluster powered by iPhone 6s which is capable of competing (financially or computationally) with a cluster powered by servers designed for this purpose.

• by fpvracing on 6/23/15, 8:26 AM

  Sorry, I don't get it. Why use mobile phones when you can just use servers that don't have redundant features such as screens, cameras and sensors?

  Are you suggesting that the economy of scale has reached a point where the smartphone would be more cost-effective even with those features?

• by kopos on 6/23/15, 9:14 AM

  On a similar but orthogonal angle...

  Can the millions of phones be used to coordinate and build any sort of 'Cloud servers'? When SETI@Home used our desktops' idle screen saver time for its calculations, can these multi-core pocket computers be used for something?

• by zubairq on 6/23/15, 8:05 AM

  This is a very good idea, I tried it some time ago but was too early. There are people working on this privately. You do mean phones connected in a data center don't you?