What about wall-mounted out of the box bitcoin miners? Get around the physical access/security difficulties by making the homeowner own the machine and capture the benefit from its computation (rather than relying on network-based resource sharing). The economics might not really work out in the case of bitcoin but maybe there are other applications where the value of (computation + heat output) would make it worthwhile.
Heating houses with high performance servers
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Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#32I 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.
Only if you rely on resistive heating, which most people don't, because it is ridiculously expensive.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#33A 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.
> fjernvarme
We Germans have that, too - Fernwärme :)
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#34I 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.
If your house is well-enough insulated for that to be true, you wouldn't need much heat in the winter anyway!
For most of us, forced air is far more efficient than lightbulbs spewing heat up into the attic.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#35home version of this
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-gets-green-light-heat-ne...
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#36This 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.
CPU Technology like Intel Software Guard Extension or AMDs Secure Memory Encryption closes that gap as well. It's not magic and might be flawed in its current forms - I'm no expert on that - but I do believe in a not too far away future physical access will no longer provide cheap attack vectors.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#37A 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.
I think this is a much more sensible and useful implementation, where the computation happens in a centralized location but the heat energy gets distributed. The linked solution requires CPUs to be distributed for the the heat energy to go with them. As many other commenters post, this creates many questions about data security.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#38This is, to me, absolutely indistinguishable from an April fools' day joke.
You are not alone. How would they handle the dust and noise which comes so tightly with high performance servers?
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#39What about wall-mounted out of the box bitcoin miners? Get around the physical access/security difficulties by making the homeowner own the machine and capture the benefit from its computation (rather than relying on network-based resource sharing). The economics might not really work out in the case of bitcoin but maybe there are other applications where the value of (computation + heat output) would make it worthwh…
That doesn't really get around the problem; I could install a tap upstream of the miner, and interdict any blocks that get mined. It might even be worse than the current model, since the value of the work being done is completely exfiltratable (i.e. if I steal the mined block I get all the reward, whereas I might have to work to extract value from stolen computation results).
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#40This is, to me, absolutely indistinguishable from an April fools' day joke.
You are not alone. How would they handle the dust and noise which comes so tightly with high performance servers?
Don't people pay good money for machines that generate white noise to help them sleep?
Not sure how I can spin the dust thing.