Evaluating the use of smartphones for processing computational tasks: "A case study for the annotation of prokaryotic genomes"

Abstract

Currently, there is a growing dependence on smartphones in the daily lives of thousands of people, noting that the number of users continues to rise, surpassing the number of computers in use globally. In addition, the performance of smartphone hardware has become an essential factor when choosing these devices, along with price, brand and operating system. Constant innovations in smartphones have made these devices increasingly powerful, even rivaling the performance of many computers. The example of the Samsung S23 5G, which has features comparable to a low-performance notebook, illustrates the advancement of the hardware in these devices. Despite the growing demand for advanced hardware in smartphones, many users may not fully understand the technical specifications of the processors. The article proposes an evaluation of the use of this hardware in the execution of specific tasks, with a focus on the annotation of prokaryotic genomes. The methodology of the study involved selecting popular smartphones from Samsung and Motorola, choosing the Android operating system due to its efficiency in resource management, using the Prokka tool for genomic annotation due to its minimal resource requirements and using Termux, a terminal emulator that allows users to run a full Linux distribution on Android devices. To evaluate performance, the article uses the Linux 'time' command to measure execution time, memory consumption, CPU utilization and other relevant metrics