Smartphones often have considerable computing power, but when they reach the end of their life they are often discarded, despite having capabilities that would have been revolutionary only twenty years ago.
Nevertheless, old smartphones can be used to form a computing cluster, as long as they are fitted with an unlockable bootloader and the smartphone-oriented Linux distribution, postmarketOS, which allows the phones to be accessed by SSH and used to run Kubernetes.
User “denv” has created a cluster from three phones that run several self-hosted services for him, the benefit of which he claims is that it saves money and the phones themselves are often more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
It is advised that for those with old smartphones gathering dust, or those with broken screens etc. that can still be used computationally, it could be a great way to reuse these machines.
