More exciting than the free great is the idea of a reliable, high speed connection.
But I live in a South facing apartment in South Carolina, so I just bake something if my house is cold for a few hours.
Heating houses with high performance servers
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes all physical security can be defeated but you could make it exceptionally difficult to do. As an example, I used to work on financial terminals and sat across the isle from one of the security engineers. They actually embedded conductors in the case that created a known EM field when the case was closed. If you opened the case, it disturbed the field and erases the keys. If you drill a hole in the case, it disturbs the field. If you melt the case and insert a metallic object (screw driver or knife) it disturbs the field. This was just one of the physical security measures.
tl;dr - modern physical security is much more than microswitches.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#23My 7x7 foot room at university was toasty with the combination of a GeForce 3 and Diablo 2.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#24It'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…
Their FAQ says it can still work when you don't need the heat in the house:
> Will the Nerdalize Heater work during the summer?
> Yes. Our Heater can expel excess heat to the outside when the homeowner does not require heating. This way we can compute at full capacity during winter and summer utilizing our hardware optimally.
That suggests, however, that installation is more complicated than just mounting it on a wall like you would a shelf or a picture frame and plugging in power and network. It sounds like you'd need to have something going through the wall to the outside.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#25this is such a good idea, it works well in the summer too
I suppose servers could be distributed worldwide, and run seasonally, except for the population imbalance between the northern and southern hemispheres.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#26I've been heating my room by running stanford's folding at home. Silly but it actually works
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For some things we are, but I don't know how far along open source software is currently. It would take a major incentive to get people to even talk openly about what's possible in this space.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#28I get an early start on my veggi garden with a few grow lamps in my basement each spring.
The energy is "free" because the furnace would run more without them anyway.
By the way, if you live in a cold environment and wondered why using LED bulbs didn't make any dent in your electricity bill, it's because your furnace runs more now without hot bulbs.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#29This 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).
"Especially if you have checks to avoid tampering with results (e.g. processing every chunk twice)."
See, that's the problem every time this comes up (and it's come up about as often as micropayments). By the time you get done accounting for the unreliability, hostile end-users, lack of access, customer support, low-grade obsolete inefficient un-fixable infrastructure, increased avenues for attack, duplicate processing, super-high latency, super-low bandwidth etc, you've created something that's several times slower, more expensive, more unreliable, more complex, and harder to upgrade than if you'd just stuck it all in a datacenter where you don't have to propose insane mechanisms like double your computations.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And produce a lot more heat, for the same computation!