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Why Waste Servers' Heat?
mikejuk writes "A new paper from Microsoft Research (PDF) suggests a radical but slightly mad scheme for dealing with some of the more basic problems of the data center. Rather than build server farms that produce a lot of waste heat, why not have distributed Data Furnaces, that heat home and offices at the same time as providing cloud computing? This is a serious suggestion and they provide facts and figures to make it all seem viable. So when it gets cold all you have to do is turn up the number crunching ..."
This isn't a new idea. Some buildings like this already and IIRC IBM also marked this as one of their next 5 in 5.
Nobody's ever thought of that before. I thought this "paper" was going to have some kind of design for a way to do it or something. Actually, recently I've been thinking about the way some barns are constructed. Where they have have windows at the apex of the roof. I guess that channels the heat up and lets it out right? Is it possible to put turbines up there that are driven by heat?
My PC has been doing double duty as a space heater for years.
Combined heat and power (CHP) schemes are a increasingly common using the waste heat from some process to provide district heating. Temperatures from a server farms might be a bit on the low side but it changes the situation when you look at the heat as a resource to be used rather than a waste item.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Hardly radical. Power stations have done it for years, some other food processing factories have used the heat to warm up greenhouses to grow tomatoes.
A radical idea would be putting data centers in a cooler climate so they can be cooled more with ambient temperatures.
For example like Google's Hamina data center? http://www.google.com/datacenter/hamina/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-data-centre-heat-homes
Why does my refrigerator take heat out of the inside, and dump it into my house - requiring my A/C to then take it and again put it outside?
Why does my A/C in a house take all the heat and discharge it outside into the atmosphere, which meanwhile a pool heater is running 5 feet away using energy to generate more heat for the pool?
Why do people call incandescent light bulbs "energy wasters", when then can (in the cooler months) defray the work needed to be done by a household heating unit?
Why does the Pizza place down the street run their heater in the winter yet has these giant metal exhaust ducts running from their pizza ovens, venting heat to the outside world? (Why no fins/blowers on these ducts to disperse heat into the pizza-joint?)
The point is - people think of heating and cooling on a "unit" basis - and not on a systemic basis of an overall building - or even area. HVAC systems in buildings get this - sort of - they are not single machines - but a system of different, interconnected machines which are each interconnected, performing different tasks - sort of like organs in a human body. This approach needs to be thought of everywhere where cooling is required, and/or heat is generated.
As others have noted, there are many good examples of data center reusing waste heat. Here's a list of examples of server heat being recaptured to warm homes, offices, greenhouses and even swimming pools. This is common enough that The Green Grid recently released guidelines on the best way to integrate heat recapture in key efficiency metrics like PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness).
It was a sofa.
I realized this at the end of winter when I had 8 high-power GPUs running in my condo mining Bitcoins, and my central heating was not running anymore. You put your hand behind one of the quad-GPU computers on full load, and it feels like a blowdryer, running 24 hours per day. Seemed to have no problem heating 1200 sqft. This seems to apply to GPUs more than anything, though. I don't know how many CPU servers can produce 1.5 KW of heat...
You guys have to move to Alaska. It's a nice, comfortable 55 degrees F. And my rendering cluster (a pair of old dual xeons) is making the basement nice and comfy. The Lab is currently sleeping under the rack that the computers are on because the heat is deflected downward.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The 'aside' you mention is actually the main point. Even the most efficient power plants top out at 60% efficiency. Assuming your house is heated with gas, not electricity, this means that the light bulb is slightly over half as efficient as your gas furnace.
For a recent (less than 15 yo) gas furnace over here (.nl) efficiency is in the 95%+ range, thanks to government incentives towards more efficient systems. Dunno about the US situation.
Also, heat and light needs don't overlap: you'll be running those same lights in the summer, when your AC will be running overtime to pump out the excess heat from the damn bulbs.
Finally, the effect of light bulbs on heating is negligible. My central heating is rated at 25 kW, and I have 13 light fixtures. If I installed 100W incandescent lights everywhere I would generate ~1300W in heat, or 5% of the peak capacity I need.
Ingredients:
1 lb of beef chuck, chopped into 1-inch pieces
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsp oil for frying
one bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
water
Directions:
1. Attach a large pan directly to the server CPU with heatsink compound, and brown the beef, a few pieces at a time, to avoid steaming them. Set aside.
2. Detach the pan from the CPU about 5 mm, and sautee the onions until golden brown, about 5 minutes.
3. Add the garlic, sautee 1 minute.
4. Add beef, salt and pepper, bay leaf, and water to cover.
5. Place pan over 1kW multi-GPU exhaust, and simmer two hours, or until meat is tender.