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French Company Plans To Heat Homes, Offices With AMD Ryzen Pro Processors
At its Ryzen Pro event in New York City last month, AMD invited a French company called Qarnot to discuss how they're using Ryzen Pro processors to heat homes and offices for free. The company uses the Q.rad -- a heater that embeds three CPUs as a heat source -- to accomplish this feat. "We reuse the heat they generate to heat homes and offices for free," the company says in a blog post. "Q.rad is connected to the internet and receives in real time workloads from our in-house computing platform."
The idea is that anyone in the world can send heavy workloads over the cloud to a Q.rad and have it render the task and heat a person's home in the process. The two industries that are targeted by Qarnot include movies studios for 3D rendering and VFX, and banks for risk analysis. Qarnot is opting in for Ryzen Pro processors over Intel i7 processors due to the performance gain and heat output. According to Qarnot, they "saw a performance gain of 30-45% compared to the Intel i7." They also report that the Ryzen Pro is "producing the same heat as the equivalent Intel CPUs" they were using -- all while providing twice as many cores.
While it's neat to see a company convert what would otherwise be wasted heat into a useful asset that heats a person's home, it does raise some questions about the security and profitability of their business model. By using Ryzen Pro's processors, OS independent memory encryption is enabled to provide additional security layers to Qarnot's heaters. However, Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house.
Further reading: The Mac Observer, TechRepublic
The idea is that anyone in the world can send heavy workloads over the cloud to a Q.rad and have it render the task and heat a person's home in the process. The two industries that are targeted by Qarnot include movies studios for 3D rendering and VFX, and banks for risk analysis. Qarnot is opting in for Ryzen Pro processors over Intel i7 processors due to the performance gain and heat output. According to Qarnot, they "saw a performance gain of 30-45% compared to the Intel i7." They also report that the Ryzen Pro is "producing the same heat as the equivalent Intel CPUs" they were using -- all while providing twice as many cores.
While it's neat to see a company convert what would otherwise be wasted heat into a useful asset that heats a person's home, it does raise some questions about the security and profitability of their business model. By using Ryzen Pro's processors, OS independent memory encryption is enabled to provide additional security layers to Qarnot's heaters. However, Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house.
Further reading: The Mac Observer, TechRepublic
the 'heaters' function as compute farms, i'm sure the processors are running at 100% whenever the unit is on (they are thermostatically controlled, btw).
they pay back the electricity used, so it's a win-win for all involved.
too bad they don't deal with ordinary households (minimum deployment is 20 units), i'd take like four of them (and they would run non-stop 7-8 months out of the year here).
From their website: "The Q.rad produces heat by computation, the electricity consumption is measured by an embedded counter and related expenses are automatically refunded to the host."
I know the French take a vacation in August, but it seems like you wouldn't want a space heater running during any of the summer. Even if you have air conditioning, you'd have to pay more to pump the generated great out of your home.
What happens in summer? What happens when there are no computation tasks to run?
The processors of the Q.rads are regulated to meet the target temperature defined by the end-user. The computing power is naturally impacted by seasonality. By using processors low power modes and by choosing adapted deployment sites, Qarnot manages to keep a minimum computing capacity all year long. To compute all-year round when computing demand is higher than the deployed capacity, Qarnot also starts to have partnerships with green data centers and to develop other products for sites that need heat all year long (water, industry/agriculture).
Qarnot computing is setting up partnerships with private and public research centers and labs which regularly launch computation campaigns that can last up to several years. Such campaigns include BOINC and many other academic projects. Thus, Q.rads will always have a background buffer of useful computations to process to produce heat when inhabitants need heating.
Using data centers to feed the district heating system is already on its way here in Sweden: Bahnhofs Datacenter Pionen an Open District Heating Pilot
Call it 100W per processor.
You'd need a 20-processor board to match a small conventional mini-heater which would barely heat one room in the winter.
Though the heat should be used, I'm not sure that using it for direct home heating is really worthwhile. Sure, a datacenter pushing out hundreds of thousands of watts of generated heat is probably able to help heat the swimming-pool in a leisure complex next door (to mutual benefit), I'm not sure it really stands up as a solution once distance of any kind is involved.
I could fill the basement of a tower block with rack servers, but it probably wouldn't be enough to heat even the first few floors or so of residential apartments. And for most of the year, and in fact most of the time it's running even in winter, it would be venting that stuff to the outside air or dialling back the power rather than have the systems overheat.
Because this business model is not well though-of. Internet informs me that AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X consumes 95 W of power, much like an old-school light-bulb.
95W to which you add power consumption for the motherboard chipset, RAM, network card, and power supply. Qarnot has been on the market for two years already so I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing by now.
Crappy oil radiators seem to start at 600 W (about 6 CPUs) and better ones have a power consumption of up to 2500 W (26 CPUs).
Bigger = better. Are you American? A 2600W heater is not any better if what you need is a 500W one. Also one big 2600W heater is not better than two 1300W ones as it concentrates all the heat in one place causing uneven heating. Finally they are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.
Even if the CPUs reach a rather elevated temperature (1700X maxes out at 95 C), the surface temperature of the rack is only going to be luke warm, so you're not going to get any heat radiated to you.
Wow! You don't know anything about heating, do you?
High temperature heaters are really out of fashion because they cause lots of convection, moving the dust around, and because all the heat to go to the ceiling leaving the reat of the room, where you are, cold, thus increasing heating costs.
So nowadays most everyone buys low temperature heaters that provide a mix of convection and heating via infrared radiation (with its ultimate form being underfloor heating). They provide a much more even heating which lets you turn the thermostat down and thus save on power.
The heat is going to reach you by convection via the fans, which is a crappy way to warm yourself up.
From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).
The costs of installation, transportation etc, however, are going to eat away most of the savings in my opinion.
That's probably why they don't target individual houses. Again from their FAQ: For now, we only install Q.rads in buildings for a minimum of 20 units !
I suppose, of course, that Qarnot will be paying for the electricity.
Still from their FAQ: Qarnot computing sells the computing power of the Q.rads to companies and research centers. The selling of these services pays for the electricity used by the Q.rads and therefore the heating that is produced. Each Q.rad continuously records its energetic (kW/h) and computing (CPU.h) consumption which enables Qarnot to bill its computing clients and refund the electricity consumed.