Slashdot Mirror
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 article says nothing about what happens during the summer months. You just shut down the servers then? (HTTP 707 Error: Server on summer break).
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
Modern nerds they need a arduino and a wiki page.
No sir I dont like it.
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
They are computer programmers, not computer engineers.
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.
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.
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.
We always knew the PS3 wasn't cool.
Signed, Nintendo and/or Microsoft fanboys.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Oh crap, the value of Bitcoin is below the cost of the electricity required to mine it - we're going to freeze to death!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
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!
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
Odd; I thought they were humans with the ability to think rationally and critically.
As somebody who mined Alt-coins during the winter months, I'm getting a kick out of this response.
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.
Is it still worth it to mine any coins at all with a GPU?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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).
I'm writing this from a wooden hut in rural Thailand. Place between 2 small towns, river view, 20 km to nearest 7-11, local children still amazed when they see foreigner - it's as far from civilization as it gets in Thailand. ADSL, Bandwidth Down/Up(kbps) 7168 / 506 - could be better, it's cheapest tariff, something less than $15/mo. My point is - there is no excuses for 64kbps torture anywhere in a country that invented the thing!
Oh crap, the value of Bitcoin is below the cost of the electricity required to mine it - we're going to freeze to death!
That's only if you're comparing the cost of the electricity to the value of the Bitcoins. When you add in the value of the heat you're generating for practical use it's different.
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
I guess more CPU intensive, less bandwidth hungry - you gonna freeze on media download and a like, very little CPU power needed to saturate fat pipe - those belongs to data-centers.
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.
If you have good working ISDN then you should try DSL again. That's an old trick my friends and I have used for years with CenturyLink. By law, CenturyLink has to make ISDN work well no matter what the cost. After they replacing wiring and interconnects to get ISDN solid, then DSL will probably work. That's how I got my 576 kbps DSL working where I live near Pioneer Square at the edge of downtown. I love it. I no longer have to pay per minute Internet connection fees like most of my friends.
OMG. A wire! Run Away! Run Away!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
There's no access like physical access
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
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
Mining cryptcoins is deplorable. It is an activity of the selfish and greedy.
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.
If your apartment building is big enough, club together to get a leased line which you can all share... They will install dedicated lines anywhere if your willing to pay the installation costs.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!