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Heating houses with high performance servers

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Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#41

Post by thethirdone »

theptip wrote: post #39
worace wrote: post #31

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 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).

> if I steal the mined block I get all the reward

How would you steal a block? Changing the target of the payment requires recomputing the nonce.

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#42

Post by xenadu02 »

tsomctl wrote: post #32
nostromo wrote: post #28

I 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.

Indeed; if you must use electricity to get heat you should use a heat pump which is 2-3x as efficient as resistive heating. A resistive load is 100% efficient. A heat pump moves heat from outside to inside the home so for the same electricity you can get 200-300% efficiency. (Make sure you get a scroll compressor though; the heat they put out is quite a bit warmer than the older piston-style compressors).

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like an air conditioner you are correct: Most residential heat pumps are just A/C units that can be run in reverse during the winter. They work well so long as the ambient temperature is high enough to allow the liquid refrigerant to evaporate (some low-temperature models can effectively heat a home when the outdoor air is around -10 deg C / 20 deg F).

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#43

Post by joelbondurant »

huula wrote: post #38
bshimmin wrote: post #11

This 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?

People that live in houses sometimes have to dust.

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#44

Post by joelbondurant »

icebraining wrote: post #10

It'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…

San Francisco

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#45

Post by leonroy »

I'm actually inclined to take this fairly seriously.

I personally run a 36U rack of servers in my basement for learning and hosting for my business. It gets toasty enough that the basement temperature hovers around 30-35C.

On cold days we open the door to the basement and the warm air rises into the ground floor, giving a bit of warmth.

On warm days I have a temperature controlled fan which vents the air to the outside.

My house has central heating but if it had central air I'm pretty sure an exhaust from the top of the rack to the central air unit would be do-able (not sure what HVAC building codes I'd be compromising though).

Puget Systems did a great blog post titled 'Space Heater vs Gaming PC'. They basically found they were tied in the efficiency of heat output from both devices.

Source: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-Spac...

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#46

Post by fezz »

lacampbell wrote: post #40
huula wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Servers don't generate dust, they collect it. Add a Hepa filter you have your spin.

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#47

Post by theptip »

thethirdone wrote: post #41
theptip wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> if I steal the mined block I get all the reward How would you steal a block? Changing the target of the payment requires recomputing the nonce.

The value is in the proof of work; just a very hard-to-compute number. All you need to do to steal the work is to prevent the server from sending the hash to the owner, and independently submit that proof of work elsewhere.

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#48

Post by Eridrus »

tzs wrote: post #24
icebraining wrote: post #10

It'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 wal…

They're essentially using your cooling in the summer unless it does air intake from the outside too.

Re: Heating houses with high performance servers

#49

Post by Eridrus »

jotux wrote: post #22
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distur…

Do these systems still hold up when an attacker has practically unlimited physical access to the device and you do not?

This seems like a very challenging environment for tamper detection.

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