A case for micro-cellstores: energy-efficient data management on recycled smartphones

Abstract

Increased energy costs and concerns for sustainability make the following question more relevant than ever: can we turn old or unused computing equipment into cost- and energy-efficient modules that can be readily repurposed? We believe the answer is yes, and our proposal is to turn unused smartphones into micro-data center composable modules. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Micro-Cellstore (MCS), a stand-alone data-appliance housing dozens of recycled smartphones. Through detailed power and performance measurements on a Linux-based current-generation smartphone, we assess the potential of MCSs as a data management platform. In this paper we focus on scan-based partitionable workloads. We show that smartphones are overall more energy efficient than recently proposed low-power alternatives, based on an initial evaluation over a wide range of single-node database scan workloads, and that the gains become more significant when operating on narrow tuples (i.e., column-stores, or compressed row-stores). Our initial results are very encouraging, showing efficiency gains of up to 6×, and indicate several promising future directions.