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.
Modern nerds they need a arduino and a wiki page.
No sir I dont like it.
We always knew the PS3 wasn't cool.
Signed, Nintendo and/or Microsoft fanboys.
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.
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!
This is Europe. No one here works in the Summer.
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
But putting a giant toaster in your basement to then circulate the heat around? I'm pretty much certain the laws of thermodynamics would say that's a terrible way of doing it.
No less efficient than any other central heating system.
For central heating, the existing solutions would work far better than inefficient electrical appliances generating hear.
There is no such thing as an inefficient electrical heater, unless you're venting the heat outside or something. Because all the waste energy is given off as.. more heat. Plus the heat given off by these appliances is free, since the server company is paying for it.
Free heat
It's hard to beat
Even with forced air
It works a treat
Heat is heat, it's maybe less efficient to redistribute it throughout a house than in a single room, but a rack of servers puts out a lot of heat.
You would want a thermostat that controls an input damper and an output damper, so that when it called for heat the servers recirculated the indoor air and when it didn't, the severs drew air from outside and output it outside. An existing furnace could provide supplementary heat if the rack's heat output wasn't sufficient.
I think the bigger idea has a lot of drawbacks.
Data connectivity? Maybe in the Netherlands everyone has access to gig fiber at residential addresses, but that wouldn't work in the US.
Regular server maintenance? Parts like disk drives break often enough that I wouldn't want to have to deal with the technician all the time, especially not off hours.
Power? At a residential address you would need some significant wiring done and a separate meter for the server rack. What about power outages?
But it does provide an esoteric data center model. With the right site selection, you could have a very distributed compute facility that would be insulated from single-site failures. But it would only work for the kinds of distributed workloads that don't care about a bunch of nodes dropping off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope, Central Europe.
State of the art for a DC is a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) value of 1,1 or lower. This means: for getting 1kwh used for a computer, you have to put 1,1kwh (or less) into the datacenter.
This uses the adiabatic cooling, which is some kind of cheating (you are evaporating water). But water is in ample supply here (not being California).
We are currently in the process of designing a new DC and getting the PUE value as low as possible is major design goal.
See: http://www.modbs.co.uk/news/ar...
And, as a bonus, you can always heat water - showers are (hopefully) always in style.
Even preheating water can save a significant fraction of your power bill.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
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