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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.
We always knew the PS3 wasn't cool.
Signed, Nintendo and/or Microsoft fanboys.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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!
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
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
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