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Modular Smartphones Could Be Reused As Computer Clusters
itwbennett writes The promise of modular smartphones like Google's Project Ara is that buyers will be able to upgrade components at will — and now Finnish company Circular Devices has come up with a use for discarded computing modules, which they're calling Puzzlecluster. Drawings of the Puzzlecluster architecture show a chassis with slots for the reused modules, which can then be interconnected with others to create the cluster. Just one unit could also be used as a desktop computer."
Thank God I'm not rich enough to own a bunch of stock in companies that make traditional PCs. I think the desktop and laptop companies are about to crash big time. Mini PCs that sell for under $100 already can take care of most user needs. Check out the Banana Pi as an example.
Next thing you know, you'll tell me that the modern smartphone has more processing power and data storage than all the spacecraft we've sent to other planets combined, and all the computers we built up to the year 2000.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I don't see how utilizing your old cell phones CPU cores has anything to do with security. It's like saying if you took out your old CPU from a virus ridden PC and put it in a new computer, that there is some kind of security risk?
Rudy Rucker has some pretty crazy stories that always a blast to read (even though, or because you wonder what he was smoking when he wrote them).
One of those stories, Hormiga Canyon, has his protagonist build a computer cluster out of old cell phones, even using the phone's built-in voice recognition to control the cluster.
Does that count as Prior Art? :)
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Clusters of underpowered processors are not nearly as useful as a single powerful processor.
Assuming that the obsolete compute modules are of standard size/pinout (or, more likely, that compute chassis are only produced for phones that ship in sufficiently massive volume to assure a supply of board-donors), this scheme would work; but I have to imagine that a phone SoC would make a pretty dreadful compute node: Aside from being a bit feeble, there would be no reason for the interconnect to be anything but abysmal. For efficiency's sake, SoCs tightly integrate all the parts that need to chat at high speed with one another(along with whatever else fits, just to save board space), and only such interfaces as are absolutely necessary are brought out of the package, much less broken out on the board in some sort of civilized connector. In terms of dedicated interfaces you'll have some dubiously appropriate wireless stuff, a USB slave or host/slave interface, and a few GPIOs. The only options with really serious bandwidth or low latency would probably involve creative(and not necessarily possible, depending on the situation) abuse of camera and screen interfaces.
For all those nice, tractable, problems that behave well on loosely coupled nodes, each individually quite feeble, I guess it'll work; but that certainly doesn't include most of the really obnoxious computational crunching problems.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
That rather depends on the use you're putting them towards, doesn't it?
Cell phone processors might tend to be slow, but they're rather power efficient per operation. Always good in a data center, especially if the single powerful processor gets a lot fewer operations per watt.
I can see it being useful for highly parallelized tasks. Google searches, serving HTML pages and even video streams, re-compressing audio/video streams*, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Until we reach a point where compute per watt stabilizes, it is highly unlikely that anyone would be interested in using old components to build a cluster. The fact that the parts would all be slightly different would be a headache too.
Older gear typically uses more power / FLOP, and is slower, so your time-to-solution takes a hit too.
If we get to the point where the power usage / FLOP for an N+1 device is basically the same as N, then you might see people do this, so long as they are okay with waiting longer for a result. Until then, don't hold your breath
citations needed.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Book: Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering
http://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Secrets-Engineering-Eldad-Eilam/dp/0764574817
Yes, they could compromise the CPU. Until it is powered off. It's volatile.
Someone draws a doodle.
Such things would be somewhat more fun if OpenMosix were up to date. Maybe it could be used for electric heating while running something like boinc projects - the easily upgradeable cluster radiator?
I suggested this at IBM Research around 1999, and built a proof-of-concept speech-controlled 3X3 display wall of old ThinkPads otherwise destined for "the crusher". Wow, was my supervisor surprised (to put it mildly) when he got back from a two week vacation, as I had built it when he was away so he could not say "no". :-) Another contractor in the lab described his reactions to me though, and helped calm him down. :-)
A couple regular employees associated with the lab had helped me get the equipment. Every laptop had to be officially tracked with an owner and even locked down to comply with IBM policy, even though they had been discarded/scrubbed and were heading for destruction. Ignoring time costs, the laptop locks were the most expensive part of the project in a sense given pretty much everything else was recycled, and a regular employee coworker got them for me out of his own budget (thanks, David!). Another regular employee helped with the networking aspects and tracking (thanks, Mel!).
The people are IBM who dealt with old equipment were very interested in the idea. Who wants to see useable equipment get scrapped? And there was so much older equipment from such a big company, plus from leases and such. But I guess, within Research itself, the project then was not that exciting to people focused on "new" things.
I even wrote up a mock commercial for such display walls with a female executive mother working from home in front of a huge display wall, and her little daughter came by to say hello, and the mom had programmed something fun to show up on the wall for her daughter.
Before we got treadmill workstations, my wife also liked the idea as a way to keep fit -- that you would be walking around all day in front of this display wall you were talking to, rather than sitting in one place and typing.
ThinkPads were interesting in that they could fold flat, so you could layer them on top of each other. However, I also suggested back then that ThinkPads could eventually be designed for reuse in this specific way.
But as just a contractor, and about then hitting the 1.5 year limit for contractors at IBM Research (a rule to prevent them being ruled as employees), the idea sort of fizzled. There was some preliminary negotiations about hiring me as a regular employee, but I probably asked for too much as I had mixed feelings then about the all embracing IP agreements that IBM had and similar things (although I really liked the speech group -- great people), and I also had hopes to even then get back to educational and design software my wife and I had been writing. I did go back a couple more times at IBM as a contractor, but it was for other groups unrelated to speech. Anyway, so that idea faded away.
The display wall looked a bit like part of a Jeopardy set, and you would tell it what specific screens you wanted to do what with. Another speech researcher asked me to set it up in a new lab when I was leaving. So I can wonder if, indirectly, the idea floating around sparked something at IBM Research eventually related to Watson and Jeopardy? :-)
My major use case for the wall was to use as a design tool to make complex engineering projects, like a self-replicating space habitat. However, I also tried to get the IBM Legal department interested in using such a speech-activated display wall for reviewing legal documents and tracking cases, with using such systems backed by a supercomputer becoming a perk for IBM lawyers, but also did not get far with that.
I'm now past the expiration of my non-disclosure agreement on such things that I did or learned at IBM Research back then, thankfully! :-)
Anyway, one could probably do much the same with discarded cell phones...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The big problem with building a cluster out of anything but bleeding-edge processors is that the flops-per-watt is going to suck so much compared to a new cluster, that you might not save any money over buying that new cluster.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The security problem is mostly solved. Or at least it is possibly and economically feasible to make breaking in prohibitively hard. The "cheapest bidder" and "Microsoft"/"Adobe"/etc. and "cheapest possible programmer" problems are not. For software to improve to acceptable levels of security, my guess would be that you would need to sack 95% of programmers and 95% of their bosses.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And 95% of (l)users.
...a Beowulf cluster of these! :)
This is the same concept as dropping a bunch of nearly obsolete IDE and SATA drives in a NAS for cheap storage. It just does not scale. The cost of the "glue" (NAS) tying it all together is more expensive than the cost of a new large capacity hard disk. The cost of the dock for the processors and displays is more than the cost of a decent motherboard, processor, and UPS.
The only way this would work would be if we had a single standard interface that lasted for more than a decade, and the "glue" devices got dirt cheap. You would think this is the case with SATA, but sadly it is not. Old SATA NAS units do not support large capacity hard disks, and they are too expensive. You just can not find an 8-bay NAS that will take 8x500GB HDDs for less than the cost of a new 4TB HDD.
Sorry, I wish it would have worked.
It's drawings on a web page.
So we're past the drawing on a napkin technological barrier
Could you at least taken a photo of the hand doing the drawing? Or a photo of the building that the drawing was found in?
Was the drawing done on a Mac, or was it an ipad like the TV commercials?
Personally, I only want to see drawings done with Gimp. Why are they hiding the technology behind these drawings.
With a million of these, we could mine bitcoins and it'll pay for itself!
Yes, you are right - there are technical solutions (I wrote a book on this), but the intractable problem seems to be that developers and managers are not interested in security. As you say, we might "need to sack 95% of programmers and 95% of their bosses". Or - those people could undertake to learn about security. But I am not optimistic about that.
...the Raspberry Pi board, you know, that $30-35 "PC" that not needs a keyboard, mouse, SD card, TV, case and power up ply to be usable as a desktop...
What makes his project not cost efficient IMHO is going to be the collection and testing of recycled modules.
Ken
Having worked at IBM Research and wondering if your contribution played a role in them developing Watson... You should check out this book. I'm reading it now and am enjoying reading about how the team(s) developed all the tech beneath Watson in preparation for the televised match.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This isn't even close to related to the topic at hand.
...of reusing old hardware for some new purpose. When that old hardware is headed for the scrap heap anyway, and you know the recycling process isn't particularly efficient. There are use cases where a client may have access to such used technology but not have much money.
On the other hand, it seems clear enough that such repurposing applications are always going to be a niche solution. You need to invest some real time and analytical know-how to achieve a successful repurpose. And any kind of clustering concept just greatly increases the amount of technical knowledge required to succeed.
And if some serious compute power is actually required, and core to the use case, then old hardware is going to have trouble reaching the performance benchmark. Or the electrical power requirements will be a barrier. Or cooling, or space, or whatever.
Oh boy. I can't wait to deal with the overhead of distributed memory on underpowered, outdated processors. Such excitement.
Thanks for the pointer! I doubt I'll find my name there. Also, I said the 3X3 display wall panel may have sparked an interest in combining speech research and Jeopardy (perhaps, in an unconscious way?) -- but Watson itself is a much broader system. I wanted to work on such systems then, and talked a bit about "wouldn't it be nice if..." like with a display wall connected to a supercomputer for solving tough problems, but I said nothing detailed as to how it would really work, beyond creating a simple system with a Linux server where you could say things like, "put stocks on panel 3" or something like that. I don't even remember in detail what pattern of utterances I set it up to respond to (it was not very complex). So, my contribution to Watson itself technically -- probably near zilch. It's just the display wall Jeopardy connection I wonder about. But now that you raise the issue, aspects of using an AI to help solve problems was part of that idea. But, sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov with Multivac or his robot stories have been taking about that for decades...
As for credit for being a spark, do people, say, always even remember some book they read years ago where an idea began to seep into their mind? How do you even quantify a degree of contribution? When I asked Ted Nelson (when he visited IBM once) about whether "The Skills of Xandu" short story by Theodore Sturgeon inspired his work, he thanked me said he had been looking for the story and he claimed to not even be able to remember the story's name! :-) Here is an audio version of that story, which is about a wearable nanotech computers supporting humans wirelessly sharing their knowledge and skills -- hot prescient stuff for the early 1950s:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
BTW, I gave a copy of that story to my supervisor at IBM Research, a master inventor with 50 patents to his name. He finally looked at it a while after I left, and thanked me, and said it was the story that got him interested in materials research based on its nanotech angle! But he had long forgotten it. I can wonder how many other inventors that story has inspired? I don't know what inspired it though. Maybe Memex? :-)
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
I've been tangentially around several development like WordNet (George Miller), "Mind Children" (Hans Moravec, who read my senior thesis written under Geoge about self-replicating robots as he was working on the book), Marshall Brain's early career (where he probably saw a simulation I made of self-replicating robots, and I wonder if that contributed to his later concern with "Manna"), and at IBM Research as mentioned with Jeopardy and Watson. Possibly some others (like my possibly talking with David Gelernter about triples I was enamored of, and him saying tuples were more general, at SUNY Stony Brook), my talking at Princeton about robotics and stores (Jeff Bezos was the year after me), my senior thesis which presaged "Evolutionary psychology" but I doubt that sparked much as not many people read it and that field was already developing in parallel. as I can see now. In no case would I claim to be clearly the driving force behind any of these accomplishments which are full of a lot of hard and inventive work. As with Watson, it's possible I was just a tangential spark to some of these projects to some degree -- or not! It is also quite possible that I ended up hanging around people like Hans Moravec because we already were thinking along similar lines. Also, sometime ideas seem just "in the air" for whatever reason. Or ideas come to people by other paths, often multiple times before we even notice them. (It's said in direct mail as a rule of thumb you need to send the same advertising letter three times before people pay attention to it.) And certainly, in all cases, a lot of sparks went the other way, to me. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They.. ehm.. we.. are interested in security, but as it happens we are more interested in getting paid. So unless the customer is smart enough to actually require some sort of security there won't be any. It takes time, so if we include security in everything as a standard feature we won't get the contracts. It's not marketable (unless that's your niche). Try telling the customers "our software will be more secure than the lower bidder", and they go "really? so? It's going to be used by our own emplyers only, who could just steal their computers if they so wanted to, we'll take the lower bid".
So it's not the makers of the software that are to blame, but the ones paying for it.
From my experience, that is a rather simplistic point of view. Sure, there will be some programmers that are actually only lacking the time to learn about security, but I have seen security being messed up time and again when it was an explicit requirement and the people doing it had "secure" in their job title.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.