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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
It will be interesting to see what measures are taken to limit risk of tampering with the devices to gain access to the platform and/or to simply peg cpu utilization for more heat output.
Who is paying?
Sig?
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.
There's a lot of work that requires big data crunching abilities of entirely public data sets for non-secret purposes. A master's thesis based on publicly available data (if it's ever that affordable). Professional researchers and professors without easy access to HPC but working on data or results that are not confidential. Maybe they have the budget for this. I think there's a lot of potential here.
How much heat do the current processors produce compared to a coal power plant when build as compactly as electrically possible?
A miniscule fraction. As far as I am aware, there are plenty of different ways the water is heated up for district heating systems and the amounts of water being heated up, but we're generally talking about megawatt- or gigawatt-ranges -- you'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of these CPUs running to match the thermal output.
When you can use $600 of silicon to do the job?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Whenever i get cold, i just fire up my dual Xeon workstation and let it run a bit of number crunching for LHC@home
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
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
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. 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). Having used such radiators myself, I would definitely go with the bigger one. Other points of interest are the surface area, the surface temperature and the heat transfer mechanism that are different between a 2500 W oil radiator and a 26 CPU rack. 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. The heat is going to reach you by convection via the fans, which is a crappy way to warm yourself up. Then you would need a full rack at least in every other room to heat up a whole home, which will take up a lot of space.
If you're going to run a data center, the only thing this will save is the real-estate space. The costs of installation, transportation etc, however, are going to eat away most of the savings in my opinion. I suppose, of course, that Qarnot will be paying for the electricity. If not, then they are just looking for chumps that would be better off switching back to incadescent light bulbs.
I know electricity is cheap in France because of nuclear power and all. But this is still a terrible idea. Resistive heating (which is what this is) is terribly inefficient compared with a heat pump like an air conditioner (which can in fact heat besides cool down buildings when run in reverse). It can use like 2-3x as much power to heat a building by the same amount.
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
And was implemented in Finland already 5 years ago: Tieto Press release
"the centre produces 30 GW of heat, which is equivalent to the annual heat requirement of about 1 500 houses but, through new investments, the amount will increase significantly. The heat from the data centre will be distributed to homes in Espoo via Fortum's district heating network, replacing some fossil-fuel based heat production."
The Ryzen are actually quite cold if compared to the bulldozer line.
That i9 line of CPUs from intel is packing quite a heat, specially when using AVX512.
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.
" it does raise some questions about the security... Q.rads are naturally still going to be physically unsecured as they can be in anyone's house."
When you have to reach for physical security to try and identify a flaw, it tends to dismiss the concern altogether. A lot of hardware is vulnerable if you can get your hands on it.
where are the ryzen boards with ipmi and (at least the other boards can do ecc)? Intel E3 cpus suck and the e5 line is costly to get more then 4 cores.
Also can't find 1P epyc systems anywhere yet. Where is the workstation / small server level amd server stuff??? even amd threadripper sever (less cores then epyc but higher clocks will be nice) and it makes better use of the min 16 cores for windows server core packs.
Those French! This would have been better for a 1 April press release.
By the way, the energy doesn't come from the computation. It comes from your wall socket.
This was all understood (by the French) 200 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Fiat Lux.
My cretinous old fire-hazard office radiant space heater is 800W. These appear to be 500W. I almost never run mine on full power.
These don't appear to be high radiance units as they are partly convective, but I have seen similar mostly-touch-safe (not that you'd want to) wall units in use in homes... my friend has one over his couch and it works pretty well... the rest of the house doesn't have to be heated quite so much if you throw heat where you are sitting.
If it weren't for the side-benefit of the CPU power, you're always better off not wasting electricity on heat, but space heating can be cost effective if you cannot afford to invest in a better solution.
Someone had to do it.
Which came first, the business model for this company or the obligatory xkcd? I don't even know any more.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
I used to be the sysop [ system operator ] of a BBS [ bulletin system ] back in the day [ mid eighties to early nineties ]. I met a sysop who ran a multi-line PCBoard system from the basement of his house in a Ohio. PCBoard required one CPU for two phone lines. I don't remember how many lines he had but it was an impressive number. He told me that he had enough desktop PCs in his basement to heat his house in the winter. He also had enough paid subscribers to pay for the cost of cooling his basement in the summer.
Every home has one, they run year-round, and resistive heating is what they do already. Why not?
BBC news article from 2015
Nerdalize
This was reported on French mainstream radio back in March and April, and in the Figaro newspaper back in 2015.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2015/10/13/20005-20151013ARTFIG00016-qarnot-computing-des-radiateurs-tres-calculateurs.php
The only "news" in this report is the use of Ryzen CPUs.
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.
They are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.
Though the heat should be used, I'm not sure that using it for direct home heating is really worthwhile.
Datacenters need lots of cooling and lots of infrastructure for redundancy. Here redundancy is provided by geographical distribution: if a town block loses power then that only impacts a small part of the computing capacity. Same for Internet connectivity. And cooling is not needed. Finally the buildings these devices are heating would have needed heating anyway. So when you compare the two, on one side you need to add the energy needed for the computing, cooling and providing redundancy to the datacenter, and heating the buildings that would have been Qarnot customers; and on the other side, just heating Qarnot customers. So that gives the Qarnot system a good edge from an energy consumption standpoint (which is a significant part of the costs for a datacenter). I'll concede to some hidden costs if you look at it more globally: Qarnot still needs some central servers to distribute the work (but that's not much) and it increases Internet traffic which is not as energy efficient as just distributing data inside a datacenter.
An expensive way to keep your baguette warm.
These don't appear to be high radiance units as they are partly convective, but I have seen similar mostly-touch-safe (not that you'd want to) wall units in use in homes...
From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rad can heat a 150 to 250 sq. feet room in a building meeting modern isolation standards. The Q.rad is a system with high inertia and produces a high quality soft heat as opposed to electrical convectors.
The conventional equivalent would somewhere between a low temperature surface heater and an oil filled electric radiator.
I've been heating my house with AMD processors for years now.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
The current practice of directly moving lowest entropy, precious energy to the highest entropy state - heat - will be considered immoral and eventually illegal. You won't be able to buy an electrical air or water heating system without that including compute units. Why heat with a dumb resistor when you can do it equally well with a CPU/GPU which does valuable computation, for which someone else would otherwise use up an equal amount of energy.
I'm not sure it really stands up as a solution once distance of any kind is involved.
You're assuming the distance is lossy. In this case its lossless. 600W not heat my room? Maybe, but then that's 600W my natural gas based central heating system doesn't need to put out.
My old electric fan space heater was rated for 1,500W max, but in reality only drew 1,200W from the outlet.
I have a bunch that a board with 4 AMD EPYC processors could easily pull that much current when running under full load. Maybe they'll do that for the "deluxe" model space heater... you know, the one with the fake flickering flames on the front of it.
Personally, I want to know what the company is doing to prevent you from hacking the file system on these systems to prevent customers from screwing with customer data.
a coal power plant when build as compactly as electrically possible?
This is France they don't count on coal for their main power plant source.
They mostly count on nuclear.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
..., using one's own power to heat one's home while performing heavy computing tasks for 3rd parties... Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?
Seattle too. Westin Building to Amazon campus.
http://www.seattletimes.com/bu...
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I would use the new encrypted computation library by Philips.
Encrypted values go in, encrypted values go out, and only the customer will be able to decrypt the results. Good luck hacking that. The downside is it uses more computing power. But it is extremely secure.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
To clarify: the input is NEVER decrypted. All computations are done on the encrypted values.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I think you are overestimating how much power these heaters consume. I used to warm my apartment in Grenoble with 800W heaters. (one per window kind of thing). So You could easily get that with processors. You are also ignoring storage and memory in your wattage count.
Also, even if you have a lower power heater, it is still a good thing if it is free to you. because you can let that heater on 24/7. While your conventional heater will probably go in and out during the day. Maybe you are using a 2000W heater, but it is not running 24 hours a day. The integral is heating is mostly what matters.
Think also of all the case where you are not home (or in that room) but you still do not want your home/room to get too cold. A smaller heater would do that.
They're targeting rendering work and other very parallel workloads. I am surprised they are doing modules with 2-4 GPUs as well since a lot of that work has moved that direction (especially 3D rendering). Plus, if they have a workload deficit, just just load up some cryptocurrency mining.
Living in Texas, I have a friend who is in the process of selling his mining rig, not because it wasn't profitable, but because with just 6 GPUs in a 1500 square feet apartment, the AC kept failing to keep up.
yea but it definitely surged since the last elections in the states ... its like they let loose a few cargoloads of inbreed somewhere ... nonetheless free speech is absolute and moderation is for assholes, i believe in self-regulating communities and despite the top layers being hogged by irrelevance this site is still ichiban to me. And i think its funny they finally found a use for amd cpus LOL
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I rounded.
In the 90s, they could have used the highest frequency DEC Alphas of the day to do the heating. Has the Itanium been EOLed, or is it still around? If it is, and if they can get a discount from Intel, they could use that for the heat generation