Comment by wky
1 day ago
This is neat. This group’s approach of treating the devices as many weaker servers (basically a raspberry pi cluster) sounds like the most realistic way to reuse phone hardware at scale, especially with the backing of the actual hardware vendor.
It’s a genuine shame how locked down iPhones are compared to even Android. Hypothetically you could run Linux inside UTM[0] but outside the EU Apple makes it intentionally difficult, and there’s still memory restrictions and performance penalties.
My group’s senior year project was a computing cluster on phones (specifically targetting LLM inference) [1]. Instead of installing a new OS we built separate apps per OS. Our devices were older, so the Android phones had worse hardware and the iPhones had more software restraints.
[0] https://getutm.app/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories
I doubt that many data centers or enterprises are interested in building phone clusters. I hope that this project will produce something that homelabs and self-hosters can build with 3D printers. That seems like the most probable end consumer.
Really interesting project. Do you have a link to a writeup/paper?
The closest thing would be our showcase poster[0], at some point I might write about the thought/development process (both for my sake and whoever picks up the project in the future)
[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jsJ5euZ4VXcwL4fbgJKM...