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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.
The Federal Reserve guarantees that the rest of the world will become ANGRY and dump the dollar because we keep devaluing it. End the Fed. End fractional reserve banking and inflationary currency. Restore financial prosperity to the masses!
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
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.
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???
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."
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.
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
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
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.