Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon

Abstract: 1.5 billion smartphones are sold annually, and most are decommissioned less than two years later. Most of these unwanted smartphones are neither discarded nor recycled but languish in junk drawers and storage units. This computational stockpile represents a substantial wasted potential: modern smartphones have increasingly high-performance and energy-efficient processors, extensive networking capabilities, and a reliable built-in power supply. This project studies the ability to reuse smartphones as "junkyard computers." Junkyard computers grow global computing capacity by extending device lifetimes, which supplants the manufacture of new devices. We show that the capabilities of even decade-old smartphones are within those demanded by modern cloud microservices and discuss how to combine phones to perform increasingly complex tasks. We describe how current operation-focused metrics do not capture the actual carbon costs of compute. We propose Computational Carbon Intensity -- a performance metric that balances the continued service of older devices with the superlinear runtime improvements of newer machines. We use this metric to redefine device service lifetime in terms of carbon efficiency. We develop a cloudlet of reused Pixel 3A phones. We analyze the carbon benefits of deploying large, end-to-end microservice-based applications on these smartphones. Finally, we describe system architectures and associated challenges to scale to cloudlets with hundreds and thousands of smartphones.