Lots of people have had this idea since the early days of Bitcoin mining. Some have even done it. I recommend looking up how people have set up mining rigs in their homes.
Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#22Many reasons prevent this from being practical for any serious purposes. 1. It depends on what part of the world you are in, but many homes have cooling needs for at least part of the year. The needs to remove excess heat would go up if you are adding more heat -- and it is less efficient to do this at the scale of an individual home than it is at DC scale. 2. Power requirements: While many homelabs have UPS systems…
1. Many places in the world don't ever need cooling 2. If servers are distributed then downtime is distributed, you can virtually guarantee that some of the servers over the world will be online so you can get effectively 100% uptime, something that is not possible in a data center 3. To serve tokens you need very little bandwidth, it's just text in and out 4. All of this is down to the HW and the SW itself, not the…
> 1. Many places in the world don't ever need cooling
And data centers also exist in cold places. But if you put 8kw of extra heat in someone's home that previously didn't need cooling, it might need it now.
> 2. If servers are distributed then downtime is distributed, you can virtually guarantee that some of the servers over the world will be online so you can get effectively 100% uptime,
You can! But running more servers with worse uptime is less efficient and requires more capital expense than running fewer servers with better uptime.
> something that is not possible in a data center
This is not only possible, this is how the large clouds are architected. This is what availability zones are for.
> 3. To serve tokens you need very little bandwidth, it's just text in and out
bandwidth is only one of the many connectivity advantages that datacenters provide... and LLMs are a bad choice to run residentially for other reasons, particularly power density
> 4. All of this is down to the HW and the SW itself, not the building.
Absolutely not -- basically all industry data protection standards have physical security standards. At least, any of the ones that matter.
> 5. Just switch to a different server until the problem is resolved, in this model there is no urgency.
That is true, there are data centers without 24/7 access. They tend to struggle to compete, though.
> You just need redundancy which you can afford with how much cheaper this would be.
Is it? Residential power and cooling costs more -- and that's the majority of the cost to colocate servers
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
A half rack server in a basement isn’t going to consume a lot of power or generate that much noise. I have home servers and they are fine. Data protection is an issue, but maybe this is something that SGX and family can provide eventually. A scheme like this makes a lot of sense for distributed redundant backups. The real problem is bandwidth. Most home users still don’t have decent symmetrical bandwidth. If you coul…
A half rack in a rack of last decade is 8kw. A half rack of today's state of the art is 100kw. A house older than 30 years typically has 100A 120V split phase power which can supply 25000 watts (you wouldn't want to ever fully load it...) And an 8000 watt space heater will definitely be noisy, and produce too much heat for pretty much any house.
Part of the problem with current data centers is the density. To make the economics work, you need excessive density, which comes with power, noise, and water requirements.
Smaller servers distributed more widely don’t come with the same requirements. They can’t handle all use cases, but something like a Tinybox can run consumer LLM tasks just fine, a SAN with a small server can provide backup storage or storage for CDNs, etc. No need to turn the house into a full data center.
The key would be to build highly efficient small servers that can work as an appliance. It would need to be very easy to swap them out when one fails.
Again, I’m not sure this has much of a benefit except for providing geographical dispersion. Data centers would still be more cost effective. Maybe it would be helpful for providing local services in small remote areas like islands.
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#24Does your house have redundant power connections to the grid and a failover generator? That said, my plex server for my friends is on an ups and I'm on 1Gb fiber and I have better uptime than AWS.
For many types of workloads (like AI inference), high availability is not needed for individual racks.
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#25Why don't we all have solar panels on our roof to generate electricity for ourselves? Why don't we all have small farms on our properties, turning lawns into vegetable producing land for each household? Why don't we have small datacenters on the property of each business, so the business users and IT folks can keep track of their own servers and data and applications?
> Why don't we have small datacenters on the property of each business, so the business users and IT folks can keep track of their own servers and data and applications?
These are often called server/network closets, and they're pretty common, but the trend has been to move away from it because they are a PITA to manage and it is cheaper and easier to manage at DC scale.
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Many places in the world don't ever need cooling 2. If servers are distributed then downtime is distributed, you can virtually guarantee that some of the servers over the world will be online so you can get effectively 100% uptime, something that is not possible in a data center 3. To serve tokens you need very little bandwidth, it's just text in and out 4. All of this is down to the HW and the SW itself, not the…
> 1. Many places in the world don't ever need cooling And data centers also exist in cold places. But if you put 8kw of extra heat in someone's home that previously didn't need cooling, it might need it now. > 2. If servers are distributed then downtime is distributed, you can virtually guarantee that some of the servers over the world will be online so you can get effectively 100% uptime, You can! But running more s…
> 1. And data centers also exist in cold places. But if you put 8kw of extra heat in someone's home that previously didn't need cooling, it might need it now.
That's the entire point of being in a cold place that you don't need active cooling. Just open the window.
> 2. But running more servers with worse uptime is less efficient and requires more capital expense than running fewer servers with better uptime.
Even if the cooling is free? Not even free, the cost is negative since it saves heating cost.
> 3. and LLMs are a bad choice to run residentially for other reasons, particularly power density
Can you explain the connection of LLMs to power density? This point makes no sense.
> 4. Absolutely not -- basically all industry data protection standards have physical security standards. At least, any of the ones that matter.
You can lock a box physically
> 5. That is true, there are data centers without 24/7 access. They tend to struggle to compete, though.
Why though if redundancy exists, like you said? Would they still struggle to compete if the cooling cost was effectively negative?
> 6. Is it? Residential power and cooling costs more -- and that's the majority of the cost to colocate servers
You can make cooling cost negative, if that's the majority of the cost, then that's great! And you can also place your servers in residential areas with the cheapest power.
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
A half rack in a rack of last decade is 8kw. A half rack of today's state of the art is 100kw. A house older than 30 years typically has 100A 120V split phase power which can supply 25000 watts (you wouldn't want to ever fully load it...) And an 8000 watt space heater will definitely be noisy, and produce too much heat for pretty much any house.
Part of the problem with current data centers is the density. To make the economics work, you need excessive density, which comes with power, noise, and water requirements. Smaller servers distributed more widely don’t come with the same requirements. They can’t handle all use cases, but something like a Tinybox can run consumer LLM tasks just fine, a SAN with a small server can provide backup storage or storage for…
The density of data centers provides efficiency gains -- if you take the same workload from a high density nvidia DGX setup in a data center and instead distribute it to Tinyboxes running residentially, you'd have an overall net gain in energy use.
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#28This has been attempted a few times around the UK, but as other commentators have pointed out physical limitations and lack of environmental controls become issues, and the economics don’t make sense. They make a great story though.
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#29Does your house have redundant power connections to the grid and a failover generator? That said, my plex server for my friends is on an ups and I'm on 1Gb fiber and I have better uptime than AWS.
How distributed would it have to be to make up for the lack of redundancy? DDoS attacks work for a reason, so how feasible would it be (if you had massive buy-in) to scale tiny data centers? I honestly don't think that feasible, because you can't get that massive buy-in, but I'm curious what others think.
Re: Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
#30You’d have to run a lot of Electron-based apps to go from tepid to hot water.