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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+
Well, they're no louder than an oil furnace at least. I wouldn't mind.
Here's the real problem: do you want them spewing heat in the middle of the summer?
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.
You will just have to...
...open your Windows.
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"
you forget steps 2 and 4:
You will just have to...
2) *put on sunglasses*
...open your Windows.
4) YEEEEAAAAAAAH
People, what a bunch of bastards
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?
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.
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.
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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.
"Hi there. I want to talk to you about ducts. Do your ducts seem old-fashioned, out of date?"
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!