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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.
When you can use $600 of silicon to do the job?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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
Yeh, lets chuck a bunch of $500 processors into a bucket of water! What's the worst that can happen?!?!
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
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.
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.
Reliability: they get a physically distributed compute network that is diverse across geography, utility, and ISP, with next to no telcom hotel costs. Possibly also some renewable/cogen energy credits of whatever form they take in the host country.
(As to the comment below, given what they are using them for, the bandwidth requirements are likely rather small... they transfer chunks of input data and then munch on them for a good long while.)
I wonder what they have for local storage. ISTR from my BOINC days that most applications wanted a hefty storage area so their job servers didn't have to be arsed to talk to the nodes more than once a day or so. Also best to do due diligence and ask them to verify no wifi adaptors in there... they probably aren't pricks surrepticiously trying to build an access network, but these days companies really need to be forced to promise that in writing/website just in case.
Most critical thing I learned from my BOINC days though: find out how much noise these things make. If they are purely radiant, kudos to this company.
Someone had to do it.
By the way, called it.
(I guess I might be to blame for the WiFi. Oh well. Nothing terms of service, SLAs, and a firewall policy can't fix.)
Someone had to do it.
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.
BBC news article from 2015
Nerdalize
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.
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.
Nonsense of course. They would write off processors that go down and drop them from their system. Periodically they may change out whole modules is most of them fail.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj