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

[neilxdsouza]

I watched the A16Z talk - Mobile changes everything. With today's phones having 4 and 8 core cpus, I was wondering if it's viable to have a server setup of mobile phones in the style of Amazon . Or maybe tablet's like the ipad. How would these compare to an Amazon micro compute unit? Is anyone working on this already.

[mryan]

> 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.

[hcrisp]

Someone did put together a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pi units [1]. [1]http://www.zdnet.com/article/build-your-own-supercomputer-ou...

[neilxdsouza]

I thought this would be pointed out. Yes, one could knock out the battery, screen and sensors. Maybe even android - and just leave the bare linux in there. You would probably reach a raspberry pi as the sibling comment has pointed out.

[fpvracing]

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?

[neilxdsouza]

I was thinking of how the Intel cpu brought the computer into the normal household. What could bring Amazon into the household of a normal person today? What if someone decided to create a server mobile unit - no screen, no cameras, no sensors. Just a unit that can be plugged into a specially designed rack in your house/apartment.

This is a futuristic idea - think of the 80s and the 8086 has just come out, but one day you're going to challenge the mainframes. How do we make a household capable of being an Amazon

[pjc50]

How do we make a household capable of being an Amazon

Put a sysadmin in every household. Personal servers have been a thing in geek houses for decades.

We're starting to get more domestic computer appliances: PVRs, consoles, home NAS gizmos, increasingly smart routers. Nest. Smart lightbulbs. However, because very few people have the skill, time, and inclination to manage these things, they're subject to the management of their OEM. Who will do the profit-maximising thing.

[austinjp]

I suspect we'll see a new service industry spring up to provide installation and support of exactly these types of offerings. It's subtle already out there, I'm just unaware.

"Services" are wrappers around "solutions" which are wrappers around a collection of products. People generally don't want to learn to install 10 different products, or even 3 different solutions. They want one service provider, and they're happy to pay a premium for that.

[fpvracing]

I don't mean to shit on your idea, and I do find it interesting. :-) I'm curious how a household might benefit from having its own server farm. I guess decentralization could be one benefit. Can you think of others?

[neilxdsouza]

I could answer you with reasons. But in the 1980s, one would also ask - why should we enable a household to own a mainframe. But look at what we do with computers today. You could have a really smart kernel hacker/programmer running his own amazon like business. Not based out of the US and not susceptible to NSA snooping - (but his own country's intelligence agency could snoop - that's another matter altogether)

[kopos]

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?

[prattbhatt]

There are projects like FoldingCoin.net and CureCoin.net, which enable people to contribute processing power for solving computation-heavy problems, such as protein folding. These two projects are focussed on medical research and the tech is based on bitcoin blockchain.

To encourage people to contribute processing power / storage, these projects need to incentivise them which is where bitcoin comes in.

There is a startup called 21.co which is creating an embeddable bitcoin mining chip, which can be "embedded into an internet-connected device as a standalone chip or integrated into an existing chipset as a block of IP to generate a continuous stream of digital currency for use in a wide variety of applications." [1]

As mobile devices start having these embeddable mining chips, people would be able to "mine" coins like FoldingCoin and CureCoin on their devices, which then becomes like a network of coordinated "cloud servers" which are incentivised by these coins

Also, there are decentralised cloud storage projects like Storj.io (similar to Dropbox).

[1] https://medium.com/@21dotco/a-bitcoin-miner-in-every-device-...

[bnejad]

The problem with this idea is phones rely on being able to get into a low power mode to save battery throughout the day. Keeping a phone on constantly will kill it fairly quickly.

[zubairq]

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?

[neilxdsouza]

Yes. I do mean that. What struck me from the talk was the cpu in the iphone 6 was about 25x more powerful than the pentium 100 in 1995.