This is, to me, absolutely indistinguishable from an April fools' day joke.
Heating houses with high performance servers
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#12A distributed version of this will take place in Denmark, once Apples new datacenter is online. We have a distributed heating network in denmark, where excess heat is "sent" to homes connected with "fjernvarme" translated "remote heat". This new datacenter will dump its heat into the existing heating network and will heat x homes in the neighborhod.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#13It's interesting. There are obvious security/integrity problems, but there is probably plenty of not very sensitive data to process, and regarding tampered results, if it's cheap enough, one can always process everything twice and compare them. That said, the eRadiator market seems to be limited to households in places which are cold all year and which have a decent Internet connection. What does that leave? Northern…
We have summer two months per year thank you very much!
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#14This is a joke right? Unix philosophy has long been that the person with physical access to the machine owns it. This would only be acceptable for a very specific class of compute jobs where nobody cares if you hack them. Like computation for charitable purposes. You could never host peoples personal or business data in this. Furthermore bandwidth would be limited and unreliable, as would power.
I'm not sure. Say you have a few TBs of random sensor data to crunch, and you allocate chunks of a few GBs to each node. What can anyone in practice do with that? Especially if you have checks to avoid tampering with results (e.g. processing every chunk twice).
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#15A distributed version of this will take place in Denmark, once Apples new datacenter is online. We have a distributed heating network in denmark, where excess heat is "sent" to homes connected with "fjernvarme" translated "remote heat". This new datacenter will dump its heat into the existing heating network and will heat x homes in the neighborhod.
New York has had a consolidated heating system for over a century
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#16Interesting idea. There's probably some clever software involved to schedule compute jobs onto the radiators; end users will want to regulate the heat output. Also, they must be using some rather beefy servers to generate an amount of heat comparable to a space heater (3kW).
In their FAQs they say they generate 1kW.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#17This is a joke right? Unix philosophy has long been that the person with physical access to the machine owns it. This would only be acceptable for a very specific class of compute jobs where nobody cares if you hack them. Like computation for charitable purposes. You could never host peoples personal or business data in this. Furthermore bandwidth would be limited and unreliable, as would power.
Not unix, physics.
Physical access means you can directly measure things that would otherwise be secret. Nothing stops you from reading the contents of memory wholesale, for one simple example.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#18This is a joke right? Unix philosophy has long been that the person with physical access to the machine owns it. This would only be acceptable for a very specific class of compute jobs where nobody cares if you hack them. Like computation for charitable purposes. You could never host peoples personal or business data in this. Furthermore bandwidth would be limited and unreliable, as would power.
Why ? They could embed some sort of a trusted platform module with crypto and (physical) intrusion detection, just like payment terminals. If you open the case, the system deletes the keys and you can say bye-bye to your contract.
Physical intrusion detection can be defeated. All it takes is one person to open it up to document where the microswitches are, and a careful bit of work with some tin snips and you're in.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#19this is such a good idea, it works well in the summer too
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#20This is a joke right? Unix philosophy has long been that the person with physical access to the machine owns it. This would only be acceptable for a very specific class of compute jobs where nobody cares if you hack them. Like computation for charitable purposes. You could never host peoples personal or business data in this. Furthermore bandwidth would be limited and unreliable, as would power.
Not unix, physics. Physical access means you can directly measure things that would otherwise be secret. Nothing stops you from reading the contents of memory wholesale, for one simple example.
A fully homomorphic encryption system would work, but I don't think we're there yet.