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Microsoft Suggests Heating Homes With "Data Furnaces"
Some anonymous masochist submitted a story that makes me cringe from inside a heatwave. "With a temperature of around 40-50C (104-122F), the exhaust from a rack of cloud servers could be a very cost-effective way of heating your house, according to researchers from Microsoft and the University of Virginia. Dubbed the 'Data Furnace,' these racks would be hot enough to completely replace the heating and hot water system in a house or office. Instead of building mega data centers, Data Furnaces would be micro data furnaces in residential areas, providing free heating and ultra-low-latency cloud services to nearby web surfers. Microsoft Research thinks that with remote sensor networks, encryption, and other safety measures, lack of physical security won't be an issue."
It was my old gaming rig with a 3Ghz P4 Prescott.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
see that box up top, put in your topic and it spits out how many times you nimrods have duped your own posts
http://tech.slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=Data+Furnaces+
Have they invented the Cryo - Arithmetic Engine yet?
For years. Seriously, who DOESN'T need a couple old Dell 2950's kicking around.
Ignore the excessive power bill, or fist-sized power outlets if you need to go with larger units :)
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Do you really want 10 racks of servers with high-speed fans spinning away in your basement?
I've only got a few bits of gear in a small rack in my basement, and I can hear it on a quiet day.
-ted
Repost???? This was somewhat posted a day or two ago!
I don't trust coop IT students around a rack of server, what about my 4 year old?
It's cooler outside then in our house and our electric bill for our AC was $1,000.00 this month. Microsoft said the servers were running too hot and made us install a bigger cooling system as part of the deal for the free heat in the Winter months.
And what will be done with this "free heat" during the summer?
In an ideal world this would be a really good solution - when two tasks that are going to have to happen anyway overlap, we as a society can and should make them into one task. But again, because people are inherently not trustworthy, I can see the logistics of this being really difficult to work out.
"Poppycock"
This reminds me of nothing so much as "Diesel powered typewriter in your future!" or "Flying cars: coming soon!" from Popular Science/Mechanics articles from the 50s. In other words, never gonna happen.
.
Typical Microsoft, providing a half-baked, but nice-sounding for marketing sound-bites, solution.
"lack of physical security won't be an issue" - room thermostats on the other hand...
And what happens when a drive goes bad at 3 am? I understand these are mostly mirroring content to be closer to the user, so all you'd get is increased latency when the data isn't more closely available, but who is going to want to have some maintenance tech over to their basement a couple times a year to replace a dead hard drive or blade server?
And how do you handle liability? If a pipe bursts and floods the place, who eats the loss for the equipment (or whose insurance company more likely)? What about a break-in?
An alternate approach might be to have a medium-sized data center, where all the hardware is inside a dedicated building and tended to by the usual acolytes, and have the waste heat serve as an input to a heating district of several nearby buildings. Unfortunately, 40-50 C heat is especially low grade from a building systems standpoint, so even this idea may not fly.
Nice idea but not really. In spring and summer I have no need for a heating device in my house...
We were successfully staying off natural gas until January in Wisconsin by running a rack of servers. The cost in electricity, however, was greater than the cost of natural gas to do heating. We've realized a savings as we've virtualized. In any case, there are other problems ... for example, it isn't clear that a home would have the bandwidth to support a meaningful cloud cluster or the environment to suit, including protected power. Also, a rack of servers can be a very noisy thing, and then there's the question of who does routine maintenance and when.
I think they've overlooked the way some households run. At my house, there's always someone awake. There's always someone within 100 feet of my computers. And, the private arsenal is stocked better than any datacenter I've seen. Well, it's better than some police stations I've seen. And as for police response, it's 3 minutes. That's not including the two households on the block with law enforcement officers living in them.
I've seen in-office "professional" server rooms, where from 7pm to 8am the only security is a handful of video cameras recording, and a key-locked glass front door. Even datacenters aren't all that secure. I've shown up in the wee hours of the morning, to find the one person on duty sleeping in the security office. In most datacenters, I've found ways to subvert their physical security. Sure, the front door may have biometric scanners and man traps. The back door or freight entrance may have a single key lock, and no one on that side of the building during the off hours. One of those buildings happened to house one of Microsoft's datacenters. :) Tell me about physical security concerns again...
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Classic Microsoft thinking.
Let's make a whole industry around this buzzname!
This would work great in frosty climates that need heating pretty much all the time, but how many people live in those areas?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't know if anyone has looked at the weather in the middle of the country, but we don't need any more heat! :D
Seriously, my office is always a lot warmer than the rest of my house, this is a no brainer.
This is an old idea, I have heard of power plants that ship off their "cool" steam streams off to near by industry and business to provide heat so now instead of power plant waste heat it is now server waste heat. What I want to know is hosting one of these mini clouds going to generate more revenue for me than the power it costs to run it. If it can't then what is the point since natural gas heating is cheaper than electrical heating, better still would be geothermal heat pump. Come to think of it the upfront costs would probably be similar to a geothermal heat pump but the heat pump you can also use in the summer so you would come out even farther ahead.
Time to offend someone
This brings a whole new meaning to co-location.
That /Microsoft/ suggests this is kind of ironic, isn't it? But even without the irony, there's no excuse for power-inefficient servers nowadays (no matter what OS they run). Sure, every computer and every piece of electronics will be well below 100% efficiency, energy-wise, but c'mon, are they even trying to inch closer at all? Maybe electricity bills are still too low to justify the R&D needed to get better hardware (like, say, ARM servers)?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I remember an article in PC World about the original pentium chips. The author suggested the ideal placement of the chip was on the outside of the case with the writting:
"Place Coffee Here to Keep Warm"
So will they pay for the electrical AND the data pipe to it? I get free heat...
From what I know of Microsoft, IT will cost more than buying a 99.99576% efficient HVAC system.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Most home don't have any thing near what a data center has for power back up much less homes that are wired for running a big rack of systems and a cheap DIY can lead to a big fire.
Also the power grid is not set up for that much power at the home if a full block of homes all have this. There was this block that had so many Christmas lights that they overloaded and blowed up a transformer.
Also storms can take out power / data lines for days and the cable nodes battery can die even if you have power the nodes on the line from your house to the headend can have no power and die after like 8 hours.
Flooding can wipe out a lot of hardware.
the cable nodes can hit there max capacity and slow down the speed also cable upload is not that fast as well.
Here's what Microsoft said:
They didn't say "data furnaces in residential houses". The plan is to build these things and connect houses to them, not build these things directly inside homes. So all these comments about kids running around, insurance, etc are not relevant.
What? You mean like a normal PC with a hard drive in it? Whats next, the amazing photonelectro stick, push a button and a ray of light springs out from the glass covered end?
They have
back up power
staff on side / on call
big data links
close to homes not as much as this but still more local than other data centers.
do the same thing with the phone CO's.
So somebody discovered cogeneration (again). Isn't this the second story of this type on /. in the last week?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
lack of physical security won't be an issue
Your data might not end up on pirate bay / freenet / i2p, but your copper cables and steel racks WILL end up at the local recycler.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The suite I work in has never needed to run the heat. Even in the winter, when it's been 10 F outside, the air conditioning has to kick in every now and again.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Bill Gates alledgedly said "640 Kelvin oughta be hot enough for anybody" when asked about this.
Data Furnaces would be micro data furnaces in residential areas
And each micro data furnace would be nano data furnaces, which would be even smaller data furnaces still. It's data furnaces all the way down.
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
In Alaska and canada maybe, anyone who lives somewhere that actually has weather where you heat up in winter and cool off in summer this would appear to be a counterproductive system. Save $100 a month in november-january plus say get reimbursed an additional 100 a month for data services, pay an extra 200 a month on cooling march-october.
If they agreed to supplement and/or pay my electric bill, I'm in!
Think of the year around electrical cost to run the servers. It is hardly worth it. If companies are worried about heat, build a damn data center at the poles and use the waste heat as part of the power generation, if possible. You could also harness the wind for power as well. This clearly wouldn't work for desert dwellers like me or indeed much of the United States, because, it gets awfully hot during the summer as recent records are being broken. Your air conditioning bill would go through the roof.
Microsoft Research thinks that with remote sensor networks, encryption, and other safety measures, lack of physical security won't be an issue.
Well now I feel much better. Microsoft says that security won't be a problem. What a relief! For a moment there I was worried. Now I can ponder this new definition of "free" coming from Redmond. Is that free as in cracked Windows Activation or free as in after you pay for the installation and the monthly maintenance fee free?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
An amusing parallel here is that one of the complaints people have have solar and wind power, is that it isn't always on, so your energy supply will need storage to buffer it. It's an intermittent supply. Those things help but it's hard to rely on them.
If we use computers as electric heaters, that sounds like a great idea in the winter, although I would need some bigger problems than I currently have, in order to keep my computers busy enough to heat my home.
(A 45W Athlon II X4 can currently do all the "household chores" and still usually have a load average under 1. (And that's with full disk encryption, even.) I never get around to it, but I ought to be underclocking it or running it with a more conservative power profile (*).)
If I create these new problems so that I need my computers working hard all winter, WTF am I going to do in the summer? Won't I still "need" these new problems solved, but not want to run the heaters to solve them?
We're going to have to pick the right problems, falling into a narrow band of value. They're going to have to be worth something, so that I'll have the motivation to run electric heaters in winter instead of cheaper natural gas. OTOH they're going to have to be worth less than the cost of running my swamp cooler.
What problems could these possibly be?
(*) Maybe that's part of the answer right there. Tune for efficiency in the summer, and say that a little sluggishness ("honey, when is my show going to be finished commercial-flagging?") is the price of summer, and the computer switches over to "performance mode" in the winter.
I run BOINC in winter to warm my computer room - what more do you want?
2. It needn't run all year long, or if it does it needn't vent into the apartments all year long.
I think this sort of thing is fairly common. I've been to universities and schools that were heated with steam. Heating a bunch of buildings from an efficient energy source is a sensible idea. If you're going to have a data center anyway, it's probably not a bad idea to make use of its excess heat rather than just vent it. Of course, if someone ever invents high-performance computing devices that don't generate all that extra heat, it could change the dynamic of the assumptions under which your house was built.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seems like you'd have much better success putting these in industrial facilities rather than residential areas. Lots of industries need heat sources too (not just building heat: thing heat for factory equipment melting plastics, etc). If you could standardize a rugged chassis system with a standard heat output, you could work out the finances. The server owner pays the factory more than the power draw is worth for housing and powering it, the factory uses the heat output to boost the efficiency of their existing heat solution (e.g. add the heat into an existing boiler furnace) such that it saves them cash on the heating bill.
Then as parent points out, what about the noise? There will be extra costs with retrofitting any room you have to accommodate this.
Also the cost of the redundant high speed network connections and the lack of physical security. All this to save a couple of hundred bucks for heating half the year. Does not compute.
I've been living in one bedroom flats for the last few years and never had to turn my heating system on in two years thanks to my mid-high range gaming rig. (This is England however, there's hardly any temperature variation all year)
MS is obviously ignoring the real solution to this heat: low power architectures like ARM.
If they could make this heating system a reality, it would ensure the life of x86 which they are deeply invested in as tons of server apps still use native x86 code. They may be able to switch over their own server apps but some other apps might get ported.
Additionally, with people buying new server systems they may decide they are fed up with paying MS, their non-ported server apps, paying for expensive cooling system and paying for high power machines and switch to ARM and Linux because MS isn't ready to switch to ARM.
Sure Microsoft showed off Win 7 ported but there is a good chance efficiency sucks and the kernel is far from ready and likely runs very slow on 1.2GHz, even with symmetric processing.
Microsoft could find them losing a substantial part of their remaining server market share to other OSes, primarily Linux that are ready for ARM and just about any other architecture.
On top of this, their good buddies Intel are completely committed to x86 as they sold off their ARM assets and their attempts to move to their own custom architecture failed miserably. With AMD making strides ahead of Intel Atom in the low power x86 front, making Intel's high heat byproduct a benefit would really give Intel a boost.
If the market switches to ARM, Intel is completely screwed as there are major players like Texas Instruments invested in the ARM architecture (see OMAP 4 and 5).
As many of you know, ARM is currently limited to 1.2GHz chips but since that is going to be kicked up to 2+ GHz in 2012 so that isnt a real excuse anymore. The server market has a good chance of switching to ARM servers if savings in software, power and cooling outweigh the cost of new Linux servers in a short period.
---------------------
for those who said "tl;dr" the short version is Microsoft and Intel are scared of the server market moving to ARM CPUs so they want to lock into x86 if they can by setting up permanent heating systems.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What is this going to do to the grid though? Increased demand for power for less power efficient micro-clouds means more pollution on the back end.
When heating with an air-conditioner, the efficiency is not too good, but not too bad. 1 kWh electric energy = 5-6 kWh heating energy (equivalent). So there is a ratio of 1:5 to 1:6.
When heating with just electricity, the ratio is 1:1 (1 kWh electic energy = 1 kWh heat equivalent).
In the end: nice joke from Microsoft.
Just goes to show you that M$ doesn't have any 'big picture' thinkers in their company. Sure its possible to have smaller micro centers to distribute heat but does that do ANYTHING to address the fact that data centers are connected to several tier 1 carriers with BGPv4? How many BGPv4 connections will a house have to have to carriers like SPRINT, Level3, ATT, TWTelecom etc to be viable for colocation?
What about power? residential areas are the lowest on the food chain for power. What will it take to have backup diesel and a battery plant in your house for a mere 2 racks?
What about access? Most colocation customers want the ability to get to their equipment or have a consultant get to their equipment to perform hardware maintenance, hardware upgrades, and deal with crisis.
What about cooling? Now that its summer what impact will this extra heat do for your cooling costs?
This is why M$ announces exploits practically every few months. Because someone, somewhere, thinks.. "Gee wouldnt it be swell if a gif image could execute programs on a computer whenever they are opened". "Gee wouldnt it be swell if notepad could execute programs from imbedded mime headers of a text file" and never asking the big picture of "What could go wrong? How could someone misuse this?" I am sure glad the NSA doesnt trust M$ with our secrets. If only the Pentagon would pull their head out of their asses. They seriously need to hire a team of nay-sayers just to get the counter point of some of these terrible ideas.
already raise the temp of my house by 10C
What would be the energy tradeoff running a cloud data center vs conventional heating power consumption? I'd be willing to bet that it's not very cost effective.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Back in college when we moved into our apartments, it was unusually cold for September in Michigan and they hadn't switched over from the A/C in the building yet. We closed the door in our bedroom and plugged in a couple PC's. Kept it pretty warm. It also reminds me of living at my parents house. I had to keep my door open because if I closed it, the room would heat up pretty good regardless of the time of year.
This idea has been around for a while under various names.
For example, see this existing cluster used to heat a greenhouse in Indiana:
http://dthain.blogspot.com/2009/06/grid-heating-putting-data-center-heat.html
"Hi there. I want to talk to you about ducts. Do your ducts seem old-fashioned, out of date?"
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I've already been doing this for years, with a Compaq ML370 server, and 4-5 other misc servers in my "server room". During the winter I barely needed to turn on the furnace. Sucks during the summer though.
This isn't microsofts original research, it's already been done in Helsinki Finland.
Here's a year old article about it in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-data-centre-heat-homes
I assume this server heating system would also function during the summer?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Just paint your roof white.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
If you are interested in heating during the winter, a heat pump uses far less electricity for most people. Using a server is like using electric baseboard heaters, except you might happen to get some useful computing power out of the thing. I don't have any need for any servers that are up 24x7 at home - I shut down my machines when not in use.
And in the summer, the servers throw off all kinds of heat that the AC system would need to eliminate.
If MS weren't porking up their software so much, you wouldn't need so much horsepower in the first place, and you wouldn't have all of that excess heat.
This will increase the carbon footprint as unneccessary demand for additional servers world-wide increases exponentially. Way to go Microsoft for thinking out your @$$ again..
That's an interesting idea. It'll never happen though.
This same story was on the front page three days ago and with a link to the original PDF in the summary.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/23/1320207/Why-Waste-Servers-Heat
It's already 102 outside, and pushing it down to 40-50 would be a definite improvement. Wait, what's that C mean?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Where would the heat go? :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What have you been smoking? So you want me to replace my $1200 energy efficient gas-burning furnace with a $500,000+ "rack of cloud servers" as a "cost effective" alternative to heating my home??? Are you frakking stupid????
A college friend had a Sparc cluster in his closet that did a great job heating his small apartment. Between my big screen, my air cooled rig, and body heat I've never turned the heater on in my own apartment. Of course, Texas winters aren't exactly on par with the rest of the country.
A colleague of mine used to heat his house with a VAX 11/780 in his basement.
Having built the shittiest forum interface in all of webdom, did you actually imagine the slashdot staff would subject themselves to such by using it?
Yeah, don't settle for this crap. Just ask for your money back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Anyone find the timing of this article a little odd, what with record setting heat in much of the U.S.. Last thing we need it a way to "heat" our homes....
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
Microsoft Research thinks that with remote sensor networks, encryption, and other safety measures, lack of physical security won't be an issue.
Um, yup; don't work about security, the fanboyz will buy the crap anyway.
Sounds like business as usual at Microsoft.
Regards;
It is not wise to create, for something that is desirable, a dependency which is undesirable.
One example is using tobacco taxes to pay for children's healthcare. It sounds good politically, but then you're dependent on smoking and it's a conflict of interest to get people to stop smoking.
Another example is when law enforcement agencies find they are dependent on fines from speeding, or assets confiscated from drug dealers. If people stop speeding, or drugs stop coming through the area, which is what they say they want, they'll have a budget crisis. So there's a conflict of interest.
The example at hand -- heating living space with excess heat from data centers -- is not as controversial. You could argue that there's no particular need to make computers run cooler. But there certainly has been, and continues to be, a lot of research in that area. The potential conflict is enough to fall back on what we have learned -- or in some cases, not yet learned -- from other conflicted dependencies.
Back in the day of dial up internet we had a few Lucent Max 4000 and several, I think 6, servers. We rarely turned the heat on till January and even then only had to turn it on for a couple of months.
Of course a subtropical climate helped but we did heat the office with the servers.
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
Set up bitcoin mining rigs to heat your home and possibly generate money too!