2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Once you're done with your smartphone, it either ends up in a drawer, on the growing second-hand market, or perhaps in a recycle bin. However, it's a computer and, when combined with others like it, can offer real processing power. Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, working in collaboration with Google, plan to deploy a rather unusual compute cluster built not from conventional servers, but using 2,000 retired phones.