Heating houses with high performance servers
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Heating houses with high performance servers
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#2Interesting 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).
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#3In theory, any heat generated without computation is a waste. I'm sure it's pretty tough to actually make that work at scale, so excited to see this!
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#4This 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.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#5network bandwidth is of course the biggest limiting factor. =/
Designing a data center with 1.5 mb/s upload between nodes would be.....not fun.
Excited to see if they can make a business out of this.
edit: also would suck that for half the year your data center gets turned off.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#6This 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.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#7network bandwidth is of course the biggest limiting factor. =/ Designing a data center with 1.5 mb/s upload between nodes would be.....not fun. Excited to see if they can make a business out of this. edit: also would suck that for half the year your data center gets turned off.
I think this is targeted to computation needs.
But on their registration page, they ask whereas you have fibre > 100Mbits/s.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#8network bandwidth is of course the biggest limiting factor. =/ Designing a data center with 1.5 mb/s upload between nodes would be.....not fun. Excited to see if they can make a business out of this. edit: also would suck that for half the year your data center gets turned off.
Not necessarily... it would be impractical to use these radiators as web servers, of course. But from their video, it seems their main application is number crunching. The nodes would download the input dataset, chew on it for a while, and upload the result some time later.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#9Oddly, this isn't the first startup proposing this idea, french startup Qarnot Computing is also in this space: http://www.qarnot-computing.com
I'm still critical of it, but it'd be interesting to see if it flies in a constrained scenario of condos/hotels/office buildings - there's already scenarios where data centers will take up entire floors or basements of buildings and channel heat into the building's hvac system.
Re: Heating houses with high performance servers
#10It'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 Europe?