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Energy Company Trials Computer Servers To Heat Homes
New submitter MarcAuslander sends this Associated Press report: Eneco, a Dutch-based energy company with more than 2 million customers, said Tuesday it is installing 'e-Radiators' — computer servers that generate heat while crunching numbers — in five homes across the Netherlands in a trial to see if their warmth could be a commercially viable alternative for traditional radiators. The technology is the brainchild of the Dutch startup company Nerdalize, whose founders claim to have developed the idea after huddling near a laptop to keep warm after their home's thermostat broke and jokingly suggesting buying 100 laptops. Nerdalize says its e-Radiators offer companies or research institutes a cheaper alternative to housing servers in data centers. And because Nerdalize foots the power bill for the radiators, Eneco customers get the warmth they generate for free. The companies said the environment wins, too, because energy is effectively used twice in the new system - to power the servers and to heat rooms.
...except during summer when it'll be churning out heat and you want it cool.
"What do you mean, you can't come out to fix my hard drive until next week? Don't you know how cold it is outside?!?!?"
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Fired it up first thing in the morning to take the chill out of the room.
The article says nothing about what happens during the summer months. You just shut down the servers then? (HTTP 707 Error: Server on summer break).
"Nerdalize, whose founders claim to have developed the idea after huddling near a laptop to keep warm after their home's thermostat broke"
If they didn't know to just short the Heat/Fan wires to kick the furnace on when the thermostat is broken, then they don't have my support. Nerds? Wtf?
I have had the fancy that in the future the computers with the most processing power in your home would be the devices we currently use to just generate heat. Things like hairdryers and electric ovens would be massively powerful computers full of graphical processing unit like chips. Crunching fiendishly difficult computation while performing their normal function, just generating heat is waseful.
Now it seems this random idea is coming true, I hope many of my other random ideas don't come true for the safety of humanity!
The most dangerous drug
Who bears the risk of junior spilling a juice cup all over the expensive servers?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Yet look how strong the dollar is! Odd, that...
I think this idea sounds like a bunch of ... ... hot air.
*takes of glasses*
* YAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHH *
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Bitcoin Mining for heat
Data centres are data centres for a reason... redundant high speed backbone connections, and redundant power supplies (with generator capacity). As well as physical security, non-destructive fire suppression, and trained on-site technicians. Heat dissipation is just the current focus because all of the other (real) problems have been addressed so well.
They'd like a few thousand installed in all their employees' homes. Fon't worry about after install support we'll take care of that.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Actually, the dollar is doing really well right now and will probably go up in value further once The Fed increases interest rates.
Thats what ive been doing in the winter months, only used the heater a handful of times.. usually when its under 0F. But yeah usually keeps the home above 70F inside.
As someone who manages a data center, and is constantly dealing with heat issues.. this could work! I'm amused by the comments so far, as I sit behind my 18RU Cisco router for heat. :)
"The companies said the environment wins, too, because energy is effectively used twice in the new system - to power the servers and to heat rooms."
Ermm... no the system isn't "effectively" used twice. I'm not a scientist nor ever took a physics class beyond high school but I can see past this statement. If the servers were 100% efficient at using power to perform calculations, there would be no heat left to provide to the homeowner. However, because the servers aren't 100% efficient, heat is one of the byproducts of performing work. Redirecting this heat into someone's home may be great in December-February but I wonder how they will feel when these servers continue to contribute the same heat load in the middle of summer. (Unless the company somehow has completely seasonal workloads but that seems like a horrible waste of hardware to sit idle/off for 6-9 months of the year.)
Furthermore, if AC is now required in the summer, commercial systems will have much higher efficiencies in managing the heat load of centralized server farms than distributed individual residential systems removing their part of the overall heat load. Are we sure this is a net win for and not just a marketing strategy such as re-branding the incandescent light bulb as heating device that happened to produce light???
You know ... we have these neat research servers to help you with that.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
strong vs when? 5 minutes ago? Look at the value of a dollar from the early 1900s... or shoot even 10 years ago and you will see massive inflation.
What about having access to loaned servers in your home?
Sure using the heat is great, but then use it to heat the corporate building it is housed in. A server needs a regulated environment not 110 degrees in the summer and -10 in the winter. It needs humility and dust control. And most of all it needs a room not filled with 5 yos and hot choco, and a teenager bouncing a ball off the outside of it. No competent insurer would even give insurance for commercial server in a residential house. There is no economical way to distribute servers into residential houses. If you want to distribute your servers and cut down on restate than find a why to house them in the back of Starbucks or some other business.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
and watch all of your traffic for passwords.
I don't know where to begin with what's wrong with this idea.
What is it they say about computer security? I remember - no system can be defended if the hacker has physical access. Real data centres have high security : guards, locked doors, and even inside the building the servers are within their own locked cages. Let me know me what hosting companies are proposing to house their servers in Joe Sixpack's basement, and I'll avoid.
A company who hosts its servers in random people's houses?
While an interesting social experiment, this looks like a very self-limiting market.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
... home computer, too.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
look up summertime temperatures in netherlands.
I wonder if they'd let me host a Civ V game on their servers :3
clearly you are an expert in this field and have done all the necessary research to determine whether this could be pursued in a trial rollout.
unfortunately, the project is not being run by experts such as yourself, it is being run by random dudes that just troll the internet posting drivel in comment threads. they are doomed!
What about developing practical easy to implement solutions that focus on capturing the heat from laundry driers, waste/bathroom water first either for home heating (cold periods) or hot water heating (warm periods)?
Those off the grid hippies have some interesting ideas. Just need to change the basic way we do things.
will they use them to heat water in the summer?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Seriously guys, when Microsoft 1.) had the idea years ago, 2.) has the investment capital to give this a viable shot, and 3.) with Azure, has an immediately viable and marketable need for a set of servers that can be dynamically powered up and down...and THEY haven't gotten it to be a viable idea...I sincerely doubt that a startup in the Netherlands will have greater success.
To be fair though, one would imagine that the Netherlands is colder, for more of the year, than the majority of the continental US. Still, servers coming up and down with the thermostat does not seem to be a good enough idea to be of real assistance.
A dial on the side of the server ranging from:
1) Allow Single thread only
2) Allow Multiple Threads
3) Allow Multiple Cores
4) Enable GPU Access
5) Start Java processes
6) Disable port blocking
7) Run NortonAV
8) Run Chrome
9) Compile complex C++ Template-base Project
10) Enable Adobe Updater
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or old Pentium 4s, but I don't think we'd want the e-radiators to catch fire.
1) Security. You're going to have to come up with something really fancy (read expensive) so keep the homeowners and any of their guests/kids from tampering with it. Also keep it a secret, $Xk of gear would be a good target for thieves.
2) Reliability. Even a halfway competent datacentre will have very high reliable power and networking. Some guy's house? I'd wager less so.
3) Like everyone else said, warm seasons.
So, if you need to host something that doesn't require any security and you're happy with poor uptime, it's could be an option...
that kills this. If you can't get data to/from the system, then you simply can't do this. I know here in Seattle, which is considered by many to be the tech capital of the world, that for much of the city 1.5 Mbps DSL is the fastest connection available. I live on the edge of downtown, and I'm on ISDN since Comcast doesn't serve my block and I'm too far from the CO for DSL. If we still suffer with 64 kbps here, then the rest of the world is even worse off.
It is called a Seagate 10000rpm SCSI drive.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Purchasing power has advanced much faster than inflation. A common meme is "A suit cost $20 in 1913." But the GDP per capita in 1913 was much less. You can look it up (as I have) and you will find that as a percentage of GDP per capita, a suit today is something close to 5 times less than it was in 1913.
The money supply has increased significantly faster than inflation. The quantity theory of money is deeply flawed.
I have an old Optiplex 280 and 270 running FreeBSD and Debian servers respectively. They are also stacked. When I turn them on, they quickly outpace any space heater. A couple of unusually cold winters ago, I used them just for that.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
This sounds beyond useless. Going by my Mac Pro tower, and my $30 electric radiator: Mac Pro, expensive, never really gets all that warm, did almost nothing to warm up my room, draws more power. Electric Oil Filled Radiator, Wicked cheap, warms my room nicely enough, draws less power them my Mac Pro.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Except a $20 suit in 1913 was probably tailor made for you out of very good fabric. The suit you are trying to compare it to nowadays is a cookie cutter piece of trash made with the cheapest fabrics somewhere in Bangladesh sold in some big box store. You are certainly not comparing it to a tailor made suit nowadays that would cost you easily in the thousand(s) of dollars range.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The dollar is doing just fine. This Asian Development bank is likely to also be a big flop. China is one protest away from a grand disaster. So many Chinese are taking their money out of that country and moving to freer locations such as the US.
What is the average heating bill? 1000 a year? If it is usually cool... wouldn't you just need to vent in air to cool a server farm? They are going to save more than a 1000 a year in cooling by doing this... ?
1. Thermodynamics: if you need to convert electricity to heat for any purpose you can get computation out for free. Electricity is very low entropy, low-grade heat over a large area very high, you can have the difference as useful computation
2. The article makes clear these are compute servers, not data servers or web servers. They may well be bitcoin mining, or running large-scale compute jobs for universities or the local met office or rendering a movie or ... In any event you expect a proportion of the servers in any job to fail. When you think they may have failed you restart the tasks they were doing somewhere else. Most of these tasks do not need much security either. There is little to gain by stealing or changing the predicted air pressure in a 100x100x10km block of air over Belgium next Thursday.
3. They are surely custom servers, not standard racks -- no moving parts. SSD for boot, application data over the net and a fanless design. They can be totlally sealed units entirely immune to junior's orange juice. Use mainly nonstandard form factors and they become basically unsellable reducing the theft problem and getting round some more security issues.
3. The article says that the supplier supplies power. Whatever cable they use for that can easily have a fibre built in for data.
4. Since this is cloud compute, it doesn't matter much if it gets turned off on rare hot days in the Netherlands, but if you care, pay the owner to open a window instead.
At least commercially it is BS. In a modern DC, climate control takes up less than 9% of all electricity. Those meager savings can't make up for all the problems involved here (service and installation processes, safety issues, etc).
P'shaw I've been doing this for years! Duluth doesn't have summers so NBD there.
Seriously, what kind of a /.er uses unbalanced parentheses for lists?
Atonement for years of unfinished LISP programs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even so.
$20 in 1913 was worth almost $500 today. But the nominal gdp per capita in 1913 was about $400, while in 2013 it was over $50000. So: $20 / $400 gdp per capita in 1913 = 0.05 or 5% of yearly income. $400 / $50000 = 0.008, or 0.8% of yearly income. Thus, purchasing power has increased since 1913. The equivalent of $20 today will buy you much more than you could get in 1913. That includes electronics that didn't exist in 1913: radios, wind-up LED lights, cell phones, etc.
Regarding your example of a good suit costing "in the thousands": 5% of $50000 is $2500. So your purchasing power has not decreased: you can spend the same percentage of yearly income on a suit, and get a very high quality one today, as you did in 1913. Also, there are so many electronic products that cost $infinity in 1913, such as computers, cellphones, TVs, and many other things we take for granted today.
The myth of inflation being such a destructive force is thus revealed to be hyperbole.
Except a $20 suit in 1913 was probably tailor made for you out of very good fabric. The suit you are trying to compare it to nowadays is a cookie cutter piece of trash made with the cheapest fabrics somewhere in Bangladesh sold in some big box store. You are certainly not comparing it to a tailor made suit nowadays that would cost you easily in the thousand(s) of dollars range.
To seriously address your point, how much could you buy for an ounce of gold back then? A night at a nice hotel? How about a nice custom tailored suit? Both viable choices and seems pretty much the same.
Now to seriously mock your one dimensional thought:
Let's see, today I can get a windbreaker for $10 in a variety of eye catching colors. How about back then?
How much for a lightweight water proof packable blanket? What about a sport jacket, flawlessly and uniformly woven?
How much for a Gortex jacket in 1908? How much to travel to the polling place and vote, if I'm black and a resident of Charlotte?
How much does a picture of Earth from the moon cost, with accurate topography?
Let's do one more, how much for a a high definition video recording of a Presidential debate?
Infinitely dollars you say? That they can't be bought at all, at any price?
Let's add that up and average over the number of compared items..... Looks like the old way is infinitely more expensive for the same quality. And that the old quality can be bought for pretty much comparable exchange in terms of goods and services from non-slave wages.
Some prior art already exists in France. Qarnot Computing provides cloud computing services with computer hosted in homes.
http://www.qarnot-computing.com/technology
https://vimeo.com/38095665
Not to mention that many diseases were a death sentence in 1913. Sure, health care was cheap. The doctor would take a chicken in trade; but all he had was a black bag. Appendicitis? surgical mortality was much higher. Polio? No vaccine. That's why FDR was in a wheel chair. Today? We can even cure some cancers if we catch them in time. Yeah, paying premiums sucks. I just paid mine today. Hate it; but I have no desire to go back to 1913.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's not a linear conversion. Even a $5 suit in 1913 was likely to be hand-tailored simply because mass-production wasn't as far advanced back then. Electronics were esoteric high-tech devices, not something run off en-masse by extremely specialized automated machinery. Food, on the other hand, was quite labor-intensive and made up a big chunk of where most people's paychecks went. It still has a lot of labor in it (hence the exemption from minimum-wage laws for farm workers), but we've managed to come up with a lot more farm automa since then, and no few items that use those much cheaper, more compact, and more reliable electronics that people so love to use as a false measuring stick of time-relative purchasing power.
Inflation is destructive when the relative values of income versus expenses rises rapidly or disproportionately. An extreme example was given me by an old German teacher who said that her grandfather sold a solid wood wardrobe in the morning pre-WWII and in the evening was barely able to buy a pound of bacon with the proceeds. In our day, inflation in absolute terms is mostly low and thus it would take longer to make such a radical difference - you'd have had to stash the money in some non-appreciating place for a relatively long period of time to get that kind of hurt. Instead what hurts us is the downsizing of positions such that so many people have to take lower-paying jobs even while the absolute salaries are more or less tracking inflation. Meaning that there's effective high inflation despite little absolute high inflation.
The absolute number written on a dollar bill is almost meaningless. What matters is whether or not buyers and sellers are both receiving enough of them to be satisfied. That's equally true for shiny yellow rocks, but some people can't seem to understand that. They think the rocks have some sort of absolute value.
My first unix box was an Altos. Don't recall exactly when I got it but it finally died in the late '80s.
The thing burned something like a kilowatt. It also had a four-inch muffin fan - blowing outward. While this sucked dust in all the openings, it was convenient for heat scavenging, AND exhaust. The latter was important in my non-air-conditioned college-town house.
I got a couple 4" drier vents, some drier vent hose, and a heat-scavenging diverter valve (which were big that year - for electric driers only!). Took the flapper valve and rain shield off one of the drier vents, yeilding a fitting that I mounted on the pancae fan's four mounting screws. It coupled the airflow nicely into the drier vent hose, which was essentially exactly the diameter of the fan blade shroud. A few 2x4s mad a wooden insert that went into the window in place of the screen unit, with the other vent in the middle of it. Hooked the two together with the hose, with the diverter in the middle of it, and the third hose segment feeding the hot air register.
In the summer the space-heater's-worth of hot air went out the window instead of into the house. In the winter the hot air fed the furnace distributon, providing a base heat supply to the house with the furnace coming on to "top it off" to the desired temperature.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Back in the early 1990's I saw something VERY like it when I did a 1.5 yr. 3 time renewed contract w/ a then Fortune 500 called Goulds Pumps in Seneca Falls N.Y..
They USED to use an IBM mainframe - can't recall WHICH model but that's not really that important - they did the SAME basic thing then it ran so HOT!
(It turned out that it had TOO much processing power, @ least for their needs even in heavy engineering work, & so much so, they used to lease time to surrounding companies & iirc, even academic institutions on timeshares etc.)
Yes - they even used to HEAT THEIR BUILDINGS using it via, iirc, a radiated heat type system pushing water thru radiator arrangements campus-wide to all buildings!
(Which was smart & practical bigtime, & it's what you get, efficient usage "making the most" of what you have, when engineers rule the roost in a company - wish our country was run that way, you know?).
APK
P.S.=> Great place to work by the way - place made TONS of money (lots of TESLA tech too, in bladeless turbine pumps that fascinated me - they got MORE EFFICIENT the heavier the material pushed thru them), everyone was HAPPY there, great mgt. (who really helped me along when I was just fresh outta academia), & just in general FUN to work for...
Man!
Wish I never left there in fact, since it was the nicest environment I ever worked in & in my 1st job outta academia too... but after I was done doing cross-platform talk to their THEN main computer (AS/400) transitioning them over to a 'client-server model' using IBM DLLs + their SDK to get their NEWEST addition of PC's talking to that IBM midrange (mostly mgt. information systems work really in reporting)? I was done after 3 contract renewals & it was off to Atlanta Ga. to learn more (was new then in this field) - never worked the like since (while I worked for others in the art & science of computing circa 1994-2008 that is - now I run my own business, it's better by far still)... apk
Why heat the homes exclusively with a server farm, when there is the district heating system? Just like the power generation stations pump their heat into the system, any data center with the proper connections, systems and permits could do it.
I have been doing this for years-- partially winter heating my all-electric home with servers. The only difference is that I pay for the electricity. And now that the temperature inside is up to 30C, it is time to move them to the garage. It is called Folding At Home, a Stanford University project led by Vijay Pande. In the winter I have to pay for electricity to heat the house any way. Might as well have fah get something out of it, at least in the winter time.
My least powerful unit is a lot like a radiator. It has no cpu fan, just a big passive heatsink.
And when are they going to start? Next Wednesday?
Whatever the drawbacks, it's worth pointing out that there are at least three other companies in this field, two of them are already offering service.
Qarnot Computing of France has around 300 Q-Rad servers installed in homes, offices and schools, carrying out specialised work, including risk calculations for a French bank
http://www.datacenterdynamics....
In Germany Cloud&Heat offers a generic OpenStack service to "cloud customers", and free heat to "heat customers" who have its cabinets installed in their buildings.
http://www.datacenterdynamics....
And in New York, Exergy is still at the Kickstarter phase, but has some interesting ideas
http://www.datacenterdynamics.... Peter Judge
And actually we have a website, too! Check out nerdalize.com .
There's a heat expel mechanism that allows us to remain operational in the summer, too (see the video on the site). We aim to run big CPU bound jobs now, e.g. we are doing massive protein folding. Such tasks are expensive in current cloud offerings, and there's a lot of innovations (e.g. Docker) commoditizing the cloud now. We can cut back on costs because traditional data centers have a lot of overhead in building, redundancy and infrastructure cost that we radically eliminate.
Having said that, we are also contacted regularly by data center builders and operators. They are interested in our innovation in cooling technology. We can't disclose much about that at this point, though.
Reaching Slashdot was on our bucket list, thanks for catching this! Good summary BTW.