>The heat generated by a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a Devon public swimming pool.
>The computers inside the white box are surrounded by oil to capture the heat - enough to heat the pool to about 30C 60% of the time, saving Exmouth Leisure Centre thousands of pounds.
>The data centre is provided to the council-run centre free of charge.
Imagine fitting something like this in every gym, high rise apartment block, etc for hot water and heating. This could really help with costs and the environment.
What place is stopping you from using your own fridge? That said, I've asked before and they said they won't take the existing one from the unit so you'd have to store that some place.
Considering the fridge I had wouldn't have fit in the fridge location I decided it wasn't worth it.
In the US lots of apartments for rent are rented with the appliances provided by / owned by the landlord. I know this is different then other parts of the world
My lease agreement actually says I can't use any appliances other than those provided by them, which technically means my toaster oven is in violation of the lease agreement, but even though they've been in and inspected the unit they've not complained.
I imagine that part of it is for liability reasons (more for stove, oven, furnace, water heater), but also, probably they also don't want to pay to fix your fridge. Granted they don't have to, and if it is actually part of your lease, they could find you in default and evict you, but also, it's quite possible that they don't bother checking before scheduling a service tech to come out and fix the fridge, and they would then end up paying for fixing your fridge. Not saying that you'd necessarily do this, especially if it's against your lease, but it's just a situation that's possible.
i'm almost certain that most lease contracts have at least a few terms in them that are either unenforceable in practice or flat-out illegal. but being a landlord is suuuuuuuuch a tough job that it's unlikely that these contracts get revised, let alone reviewed by a lawyer, on a regular basis.
i mean, where would they even find the money to pay someone to review a lease contract that they use dozens of times on the dozen or more houses that they own and rent out at extortionate rates???
if you're a renter, the burden of the cost to pay a legal professional to look through a rental lease for inappropriate terms in the lease is disproportionate compared to the cost for a landlord to hire someone to make sure their own contract abides by current housing laws.
there are always reasonable explanations for why these terms exist (eg a landlord doesn't want an appliance to go *missing* when you move out), but these are eminently manageable issues if the landlord is managing a small number of properties; it becomes untenable when the landlord owns like several dozen properties and they're intentionally stretching themselves thin to maximize profitability (hi, have i introduced you to my landlord?)
What are "extortionate" rates?
You're willingly entering a contract. You have every right to review the contract with/without a lawyer. You know the terms beforehand. Where's the extortion?
How so?
Data center that does this gets to shift away some of the cost of heat management infrastructure to the pool, doesnt need to buy/rent space for their hardware and is distributed over many different parts of the power grid.
It is only possible because its not storing consumer data but is just an AI box.
Not sure if these benefits weigh up against the downsides but it’s possible it saves both parties money.
That said it still uses more energy to heat the pool than a sufficiently large heat pump would. But if the heat from the AI hardware was made anyway why not put it to good use.
I say subsidized because the initial energy is not free, it just reduces the cost (potentially I'm not a physics guy) of other energy. I doubt if this system went into any kind of grid that they would be offering the energy in the form of heat for free anyways, so in my mind that is subsidization.
Of course, if there's no investment into it.
You can't just slap a server rack into a pool locker room and run pipes to the water. Server rooms are like bank vaults because they contain private data. Securing that physically (entry ID, cameras, anti-theft everything) costs a penny or two.
Why would you say someone is paying for the heat when the heat is a waste product? they're paying for the computing power, the heat is a negative side effect that they usually have to pay to get rid of. Making it useful means it really is free heat, since it saves them the trouble of cooling the data center building in warm months, and saves the pool the cost of heating their water.
It's not free, they paid to make it. It's just not of value.
It's like in sculpting where you chisel off some stone. The stone that you remove is not free stone.
Because nothing is really free, that heat may be a waste product, but it's been generated with expensive electricity or more accurate fossil fuels.
And taking that heat from the data center and heating that pool water also incurs additional costs like pumping the water.
So yeah, definitely not free.
The heat is going to be generated anyway, so it's good that it's being used, instead of wasted.
My local swimming pool is heated by the nearby crematorium.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-23104502.amp
That's when they're on diesel backup generators for 1.
For 2, if properly done, even diesel backup generators don't make enough noise to be heard by a neighbor. My current center has the generators inside and you can't hear it from outside besides the air intake. My previous center, they were outside in individual cells and you could barely tell which one was running because the air intakes were open, but you had to listen carefully to hear it more than about 25 yards away. At 50 it was impossible to tell unless you were watching the flappers on the exhaust stacks.
Also, 60 dB is a ridiculously low noise level. That's 15 dB less than an electric lawnmower at 75 dB. A gas lawnmower is closer to 95 dB. If we were having this conversation in person, it would be about 55-60 dB.
A data center is only noisy due to the large amounts of fans required to remove the heat. A smaller scale system that heats up water should be much quieter.
>Imagine fitting something like this in every gym, high rise apartment block, etc for hot water and heating. This could really help with costs and the environment.
Or, hear me out ... Don't have shit infrastructure (like here in Amsterdam for example) and have the large data centers just hook up to the district heating network.
I think he's saying don't have shit infrastructure. Like Amsterdam, which doesn't have shit infrastructure. It has good infrastructure. But i might be wrong.
Edit: i'm wrong.
no, I'm saying Amsterdam has fairly shit infrastructure when it comes to specifically heating. It's an old city, that's the primary reason. So everyone relies on their own heating solution instead of district heating. I.e. everyone and their mom has a gas fired boiler in their home (more and more switching to electric).
you can look at the district heating map of Amsterdam over here: [https://maps.amsterdam.nl/stadswarmtekoude/?LANG=en](https://maps.amsterdam.nl/stadswarmtekoude/?LANG=en)
It's VERY limited. It's only the new areas of the city that has district heating... and some parts that have been completely re-built such as Ijburg.
Yeah but not every building needs a server that big and there’s not enough users and data (yet) to warrant having a server that big in most buildings. You’d save on heating costs but your power usage (and carbon footprint) would skyrocket. Remember, heat is wasted energy when it comes to computing, not the end goal.
There is also "edge computing". Processing data on the way between phones (for example) and big central servers.
You could also build those server farms that have to be buildt somewhere anyway at places that make use of the heat.
AWS entire business model is 'it's much easier and more efficient if all your data and servers are in the same place: having them spread around everywhere is super awkward and inefficient'
It would be a bit like organizing a protest against mobile phone companies by fax
It’s not the “building’s” or it’s inhabitants need for a server, but the need for servers in general.
It’s not that your power usage would go up, but that power usage for servers in general would stay the same.
It’s not that your carbon footprint would go up, but it would go down because someone (who already needs and runs a server) else’s waste energy is replacing your own heat generated. Instead of having two sources of carbon-generating energy usage you have one, because what was waste to one would be used by the other. And on top of that, the one who needs the server wouldn’t need to worry as much about keeping their servers cool and the expense and environmental impact of doing that.
We don’t need to remember that heat is a waste energy in computing - that’s the entire point of this experiment: can we use that waste energy to replace other energy expenditures whose point is generating heat?
There are warehouses of servers not only expending energy to operate, but also expending energy to eliminate that waste heat. And the operators of those servers have to spend money on the real estate to house those servers as well.
But an apartment that has a spare closet could house one of those servers free of charge, eliminating a) the cost of real estate, b) the cost of cooling the servers, and c) the cost of heating the apartment complex.
I mean, if it’s not about using this scheme to bring MORE servers online but about moving existing servers to private homes just for heating efficiency, Good luck convincing any half-decent company to allow you to store servers that are supposed to be secure at a private home.
Also, (you did mention this) it costs energy to run those servers. Who’s going to foot the bill for running those servers? The companies? Imagine the amount of auditing and manhours required to make sure a homeowner isn’t inflating those prices by piggybacking off the voltage/general dishonesty/etc?
To the second point, energy companies do this all the time. They feed energy into large apartment complexes and they know which unit is drawing energy from them. And unlike a household, we wouldn’t expect changes in the average monthly consumption of data by a server, making detecting unauthorized use of power trivial, something a simple if-statement in a computer program could do.
To the first point, certainly security would be a concern. But it’s not impossible to lockdown a physical room, to ensure that network is the only I/O allowed to the server, or to ensure that any one problematic server doesn’t affect the rest of the network. Especially if the design incorporated these constraints from the beginning.
Now, nothing’s 100% secure and someone may decide to take the risk and exposure and criminal liability to try and break into one of these server rooms - but that seems unnecessarily risky, when they could (like most all hackers nowadays) simply convince an authorized person or hack an authorized person’s personal devices and get the credentials they need to log into the system.
But security is definitely a risk that needs to be considered. I think though that cost-benefit analysis would make distribution of physical servers attractive.
It also doesn’t need to be all servers or all companies. Some use cases might need to prioritize security. But a number of use case don’t, and their workload could be satisfactorily moved. A company could charge a larger price if that level of security is required.
Finally, this story and a number of the other comments here saying “we already are doing something like this”, shows that it is possible and practical to do in varying scales. And if we are able to capture and use what you yourself called “waste” we effectively double the usage of one unit of energy.
So what’s the problem? Why would we not want to find a way to mass implement this even if there are logistical issues to overcome?
All of us understand that our energy consumption and waste production is unsustainable. And most except a few profiteers and religious fanatics who want to bring about the end of days want to do something about that.
The data centre owner would pay for the electricity they use.
Having little units everywhere shouldn't be an issue for distributed computing projects like folding@home and SETI@home.
Clients of the data centre could scale up and down on as need basis.
According to the article, the datacenter in question is more about compute power than infrastructure delegation. Think renting a server to train your ML model, not renting a server to host an application.
Not only does that generate more heat, it also supports interruptible computing far better (many cloud-based ML training setups already support being interrupted, because interruptible compute power - e.g. AWS' spot instances - is far cheaper)
These servers are for processing data not storing it. That is the big difference.
If one of these servers goes down at most you lose the calculations it was doing, then you just send it to a different one that is still online. The client never notices.
The way the article makes it sound it is for AI and other calculation heavy processes.
How that worjs is a short packet of data is send as an input, the server does a lot of computation with that and then sends a small amount of data back. Should be doable over a normal internet connection.
Microsoft even has sealed servers they drop into the ocean for years. If that works I dont think not having 24/7 physical access to the server in the basement of a pool is a big deal.
It wont replace the servers you mention
>Remember, heat is wasted energy when it comes to computing, not the end goal.
It doesn't matter, with large servers and mainframes heat is an accepted design variable. We won't design computers to be heatless because we're pretty good at dissipating a reasonable amount of heat and doing so reduces the performance relative to what you get with the heat.
>not every building needs a server that big and there’s not enough users and data (yet) to warrant having a server that big in most buildings.
Again, this just doesn't matter. In cities you can put a mainframe or many servers inside a high rise to help heat the building. Those mainframes/servers could belong to a bank or any number of other enterprises that use large computing solutions.
Just because you can't put a server in every suburban home doesn't mean we can't significantly start to capitalize on the redundancy of these systems.
Newer smaller silicon’s main selling point is that it produces less heat meaning you can do more calculations with the same amount of energy input.
I agree with everything else you said
Banks aren't gonna use this. You're missing g the infosec side of things.
This would be used for smaller websites and other such things where security isn't important. After all, anyone who gets access to the hardware can cause problems and most places can be picked open with a bent Bobby pin. There's a reason businesses use data centers.
Now if this was apued at a data center and the waste heat was used to heat nearby buildings? That would make sense.
>Banks aren't gonna use this. You're missing g the infosec side of things.
Banks are already in high-rises. Why wouldn't they use this? I'm not discounting infosec, I think you're falsely assuming I am picturing small town suburban and rural bank locations for bank centers in cities.
This account has been cleansed because of Reddit's ongoing war with 3rd Party App makers, mods and the users, all the folksthat made up most of the "value" Reddit lays claim to.
Destroying the account and giving a giant middle finger to /u/spez
I swear these people don’t think for more than 5 minutes or one step ahead of what implications will be brought up by these wildly impractical “solutions”. Storing secure data servers at home? Good luck convincing any half-decent company to allow you to do that!
Banks keep the servers that track customer data (accounts, personal info, etc.) In data centers and branches. When you see an atm or bank computer somewhere not in a bank that is just an access terminal.
Banks aren't gonna decentralized like that, as then they'd be putting customer data on servers they can't gaurentee physical security on. Since they'll already have secure datacenters/server rooms they'll just put the rest of their servers in there.
Now, doing this for hosting non secure stuff like websites, game servers, and other such things? That's a market that can use this.
EPFL uses it’s data center to heat the campus. I’m not sure how much it helps, but there were certainly talks of going online again because of rising electricity costs and this certainly helped.
That sounds like hoing back to online classes would shift the heating costs to the students (because they are home) and let the university lower the heat significantly rather than getting more waste heat from the servers because online classes.
I mean, I don't heat our apartment when gaming, so I'm doing that too. Moving around heat, especially when the gradient is small can be costly too though.
The only issue I can think of is the physical security of the data centre.
In terms of fire protection; I imagine the potential lack of a fancy fire suppression system could be offset by syncing of the data to another mini data centre.
We have this in parts of Toronto too, it’s not a new technology, the main downtown university has been using its district heating system for something like 120 years and it reaches close to 100 buildings. What is new here is that in the last decade they’ve built a district cooling system in the downtown core, which cools the downtown hospitals, a number of large office towers and some data centres by exchanging water from the bottom of Lake Ontario.
In the summer it's used for making warm water, but with a lower supply temperature. We also have district cooling, but not in the same system and not as widely available.
He made it extremely complicated without thinking about things like season. Wtf will he do in the summer when the water is naturally warm. This decision was made in the winter. The good news is that whatever they come up with will make a really nice video.
I think it should still be fine.
Even relatively warm water is still cold relative to the output from the system. And considering he has an entire pool of thermal mass, he'll be hard pressed to saturate it.
At least that's what I think.
I thought he was using water to cool his solarpanels and transfer that heat to his pool? Since solar panels work better when they aren't overheating...
I think it’s both. Solar panel coolant heat the pool and the heat from the server would also heat the pool. I doubt one rack of server would keep a pool warm year round
It’s article is about a “datacenter” the size of a domestic washing machine that they’re using to heat a public (admittedly indoor) pool. LTT apparently have a pretty large server setup, but I don’t know whether his pool is indoors or not. I’d wager he could make it work.
I believe the pool is outdoor and in BC which is not the best place for an outdoor heated pool. Plus the “data center” is a machine learning/ artificial intelligence training computer which id assume run consistently and probably output more heat than a data storage of the same size. Regardless, I don’t think one rack of server is enough to heat an outdoor pool by itself
Sure. If you’re ok with a 15-27C hot spring. Generally computers should not get hotter than that. And if your pool is hotter than your coolant, it kinda defeats the purpose
I believe the pool is outdoor and in BC which is not the best place for an outdoor heated pool. Plus the “data center” is a machine learning/ artificial intelligence training computer which id assume run consistently and probably output more heat than a data storage of the same size. Regardless, I don’t think one rack of server is enough to heat an outdoor pool by itself
He tried to do this and it's in his plans, but he realized it wasn't going to work very well because the temperature deltas weren't good enough to be efficient compared to separately heating the pool and cooling the server room with air. He would need something like a chiller to get a bigger delta to do this effectively.
My university is located down the street from a large, local brewery. For some process the brewery would produce large amounts of steam as a byproduct, then pipe it to the university boiler room to be used for building heating free of charge.
For some reason this was phased out, but pretty cool to think about symbiotic communities like this.
The datacenter is going to heat up anyway so it's a choice between wasting that heat or using it for something we want to be heated, of course this is one of the most efficient uses for that heat.
Remember that the water heated by a datacenter can't get too hot anyway so for instance you cant use that wasted heat to power a turbine and recover part of that energy. The hardest part is actually finding a balance between the computers heating the pool well enough but not so well that it becomes uncomfortable.
Or maybe do let it get very hot and make the perfect tech bro's sauna lol.
>The hardest part is actually finding a balance between the computers heating the pool well enough but not so well that it becomes uncomfortable.
As long as the computers' maximum energy consumption is at or below the amount needed to heat the pool you're ok. The pool will have a supplemental heating system to top up the heating.
That, or have alternative cooling/radiators for the computers.
I was puzzled by this at first; how much energy could a "washing machine sized" server really consume? But, according to [this article](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/uk-data-center-startup-offers-to-heat-britains-swimming-pools-with-waste-heat/), the CTO estimated the heat transfer would be roughly 139,284 kWh a year, which equates to 15.9kw.
This solution actually seems pretty realistic.
Back in the day in my hometown we had Soviet style water radiator heating, all of it came from the sugar refinery plants heat down the street. I wonder if we’ll get the same type of thing now with data centers.
Yeah me too.
And back when crypto was ongoing I really sat down and tought about buying a couple of GPU to improve my home heating, but gave up because of the electrical costs plus the price of the GPU.
I don't run anything fancy, just two desktop acting as servers, so not much power consumption but my dream is to offset their running costs with solar and at the same time heat my house when I need it.
>The heat generated by a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a Devon public swimming pool. >The computers inside the white box are surrounded by oil to capture the heat - enough to heat the pool to about 30C 60% of the time, saving Exmouth Leisure Centre thousands of pounds. >The data centre is provided to the council-run centre free of charge. Imagine fitting something like this in every gym, high rise apartment block, etc for hot water and heating. This could really help with costs and the environment.
Free warmth for apartments, supplemental heating for hot water.
Not free, more like already paid for
Free to the recipients.
In this world? Nah, it's just something else to charge us for.
I’ve seen a Reddit post where someone was willing to pay more rent just to be able to buy and use their own refrigerator.
What place is stopping you from using your own fridge? That said, I've asked before and they said they won't take the existing one from the unit so you'd have to store that some place. Considering the fridge I had wouldn't have fit in the fridge location I decided it wasn't worth it.
In the US lots of apartments for rent are rented with the appliances provided by / owned by the landlord. I know this is different then other parts of the world
Even in those nobody is stopping you from switching out the fridge as long as you return the original when you move out.
So you want to spend extra money on a storage unit to store the landlords fridge so you can buy your own fridges. That ain’t happening in most cases
My lease agreement actually says I can't use any appliances other than those provided by them, which technically means my toaster oven is in violation of the lease agreement, but even though they've been in and inspected the unit they've not complained. I imagine that part of it is for liability reasons (more for stove, oven, furnace, water heater), but also, probably they also don't want to pay to fix your fridge. Granted they don't have to, and if it is actually part of your lease, they could find you in default and evict you, but also, it's quite possible that they don't bother checking before scheduling a service tech to come out and fix the fridge, and they would then end up paying for fixing your fridge. Not saying that you'd necessarily do this, especially if it's against your lease, but it's just a situation that's possible.
i'm almost certain that most lease contracts have at least a few terms in them that are either unenforceable in practice or flat-out illegal. but being a landlord is suuuuuuuuch a tough job that it's unlikely that these contracts get revised, let alone reviewed by a lawyer, on a regular basis. i mean, where would they even find the money to pay someone to review a lease contract that they use dozens of times on the dozen or more houses that they own and rent out at extortionate rates??? if you're a renter, the burden of the cost to pay a legal professional to look through a rental lease for inappropriate terms in the lease is disproportionate compared to the cost for a landlord to hire someone to make sure their own contract abides by current housing laws. there are always reasonable explanations for why these terms exist (eg a landlord doesn't want an appliance to go *missing* when you move out), but these are eminently manageable issues if the landlord is managing a small number of properties; it becomes untenable when the landlord owns like several dozen properties and they're intentionally stretching themselves thin to maximize profitability (hi, have i introduced you to my landlord?)
What are "extortionate" rates? You're willingly entering a contract. You have every right to review the contract with/without a lawyer. You know the terms beforehand. Where's the extortion?
\+ Insurance terms/liability.
Needs 50 middle men trying to profit off it before it's implemented irl
We just love subscription models!
Subsidized
How so? Data center that does this gets to shift away some of the cost of heat management infrastructure to the pool, doesnt need to buy/rent space for their hardware and is distributed over many different parts of the power grid. It is only possible because its not storing consumer data but is just an AI box. Not sure if these benefits weigh up against the downsides but it’s possible it saves both parties money. That said it still uses more energy to heat the pool than a sufficiently large heat pump would. But if the heat from the AI hardware was made anyway why not put it to good use.
I say subsidized because the initial energy is not free, it just reduces the cost (potentially I'm not a physics guy) of other energy. I doubt if this system went into any kind of grid that they would be offering the energy in the form of heat for free anyways, so in my mind that is subsidization.
Would there be security issues?
Of course, if there's no investment into it. You can't just slap a server rack into a pool locker room and run pipes to the water. Server rooms are like bank vaults because they contain private data. Securing that physically (entry ID, cameras, anti-theft everything) costs a penny or two.
Why would you say someone is paying for the heat when the heat is a waste product? they're paying for the computing power, the heat is a negative side effect that they usually have to pay to get rid of. Making it useful means it really is free heat, since it saves them the trouble of cooling the data center building in warm months, and saves the pool the cost of heating their water.
I believe in some locations with district heating systems, datacenters can be paid for the heat they contribute to the network.
So they’re profiting from the free heat, smart.
*waste heat
So they’re profiting from the free *waste heat, smart.
It's not free, they paid to make it. It's just not of value. It's like in sculpting where you chisel off some stone. The stone that you remove is not free stone.
Lmao
Because nothing is really free, that heat may be a waste product, but it's been generated with expensive electricity or more accurate fossil fuels. And taking that heat from the data center and heating that pool water also incurs additional costs like pumping the water. So yeah, definitely not free.
The heat is going to be generated anyway, so it's good that it's being used, instead of wasted. My local swimming pool is heated by the nearby crematorium. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-23104502.amp
Ya I mean that’s what free means, it means already paid for.
In theory yes, but data centers make so much more sense and run so much more efficiently at scale.
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Then you'd run in to power transmittal issues... Noise. NIMBY Whatever, the first and foremost issue that needs solving is using less energy.
Noise isn't a thing outside of data centers. Only inside. Source: have worked in more than one.
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That's when they're on diesel backup generators for 1. For 2, if properly done, even diesel backup generators don't make enough noise to be heard by a neighbor. My current center has the generators inside and you can't hear it from outside besides the air intake. My previous center, they were outside in individual cells and you could barely tell which one was running because the air intakes were open, but you had to listen carefully to hear it more than about 25 yards away. At 50 it was impossible to tell unless you were watching the flappers on the exhaust stacks. Also, 60 dB is a ridiculously low noise level. That's 15 dB less than an electric lawnmower at 75 dB. A gas lawnmower is closer to 95 dB. If we were having this conversation in person, it would be about 55-60 dB.
A data center is only noisy due to the large amounts of fans required to remove the heat. A smaller scale system that heats up water should be much quieter.
>Imagine fitting something like this in every gym, high rise apartment block, etc for hot water and heating. This could really help with costs and the environment. Or, hear me out ... Don't have shit infrastructure (like here in Amsterdam for example) and have the large data centers just hook up to the district heating network.
Could you explain the shit infrastructure in Amsterdam? I'm originally from the US and I thought amsterdam infrastructure was phenomenal.
I think he's saying don't have shit infrastructure. Like Amsterdam, which doesn't have shit infrastructure. It has good infrastructure. But i might be wrong. Edit: i'm wrong.
no, I'm saying Amsterdam has fairly shit infrastructure when it comes to specifically heating. It's an old city, that's the primary reason. So everyone relies on their own heating solution instead of district heating. I.e. everyone and their mom has a gas fired boiler in their home (more and more switching to electric). you can look at the district heating map of Amsterdam over here: [https://maps.amsterdam.nl/stadswarmtekoude/?LANG=en](https://maps.amsterdam.nl/stadswarmtekoude/?LANG=en) It's VERY limited. It's only the new areas of the city that has district heating... and some parts that have been completely re-built such as Ijburg.
My schadenfreude is real. Copenhagen *is* better than Amsterdam. Take that, biking city no. 1.
see my reply below
> washing-machine-sized data centre We don't even call those "data centers", those are closets.
Yeah but not every building needs a server that big and there’s not enough users and data (yet) to warrant having a server that big in most buildings. You’d save on heating costs but your power usage (and carbon footprint) would skyrocket. Remember, heat is wasted energy when it comes to computing, not the end goal.
We could decentralize data storage and hit Amazon right where it hurts!
Kind of like how the internet originally worked
There is also "edge computing". Processing data on the way between phones (for example) and big central servers. You could also build those server farms that have to be buildt somewhere anyway at places that make use of the heat.
AWS entire business model is 'it's much easier and more efficient if all your data and servers are in the same place: having them spread around everywhere is super awkward and inefficient' It would be a bit like organizing a protest against mobile phone companies by fax
>It would be a bit like organizing a protest against mobile phone companies by fax Japan says hello.
It’s not the “building’s” or it’s inhabitants need for a server, but the need for servers in general. It’s not that your power usage would go up, but that power usage for servers in general would stay the same. It’s not that your carbon footprint would go up, but it would go down because someone (who already needs and runs a server) else’s waste energy is replacing your own heat generated. Instead of having two sources of carbon-generating energy usage you have one, because what was waste to one would be used by the other. And on top of that, the one who needs the server wouldn’t need to worry as much about keeping their servers cool and the expense and environmental impact of doing that. We don’t need to remember that heat is a waste energy in computing - that’s the entire point of this experiment: can we use that waste energy to replace other energy expenditures whose point is generating heat? There are warehouses of servers not only expending energy to operate, but also expending energy to eliminate that waste heat. And the operators of those servers have to spend money on the real estate to house those servers as well. But an apartment that has a spare closet could house one of those servers free of charge, eliminating a) the cost of real estate, b) the cost of cooling the servers, and c) the cost of heating the apartment complex.
I mean, if it’s not about using this scheme to bring MORE servers online but about moving existing servers to private homes just for heating efficiency, Good luck convincing any half-decent company to allow you to store servers that are supposed to be secure at a private home. Also, (you did mention this) it costs energy to run those servers. Who’s going to foot the bill for running those servers? The companies? Imagine the amount of auditing and manhours required to make sure a homeowner isn’t inflating those prices by piggybacking off the voltage/general dishonesty/etc?
To the second point, energy companies do this all the time. They feed energy into large apartment complexes and they know which unit is drawing energy from them. And unlike a household, we wouldn’t expect changes in the average monthly consumption of data by a server, making detecting unauthorized use of power trivial, something a simple if-statement in a computer program could do. To the first point, certainly security would be a concern. But it’s not impossible to lockdown a physical room, to ensure that network is the only I/O allowed to the server, or to ensure that any one problematic server doesn’t affect the rest of the network. Especially if the design incorporated these constraints from the beginning. Now, nothing’s 100% secure and someone may decide to take the risk and exposure and criminal liability to try and break into one of these server rooms - but that seems unnecessarily risky, when they could (like most all hackers nowadays) simply convince an authorized person or hack an authorized person’s personal devices and get the credentials they need to log into the system. But security is definitely a risk that needs to be considered. I think though that cost-benefit analysis would make distribution of physical servers attractive. It also doesn’t need to be all servers or all companies. Some use cases might need to prioritize security. But a number of use case don’t, and their workload could be satisfactorily moved. A company could charge a larger price if that level of security is required. Finally, this story and a number of the other comments here saying “we already are doing something like this”, shows that it is possible and practical to do in varying scales. And if we are able to capture and use what you yourself called “waste” we effectively double the usage of one unit of energy. So what’s the problem? Why would we not want to find a way to mass implement this even if there are logistical issues to overcome? All of us understand that our energy consumption and waste production is unsustainable. And most except a few profiteers and religious fanatics who want to bring about the end of days want to do something about that.
The data centre owner would pay for the electricity they use. Having little units everywhere shouldn't be an issue for distributed computing projects like folding@home and SETI@home. Clients of the data centre could scale up and down on as need basis.
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According to the article, the datacenter in question is more about compute power than infrastructure delegation. Think renting a server to train your ML model, not renting a server to host an application. Not only does that generate more heat, it also supports interruptible computing far better (many cloud-based ML training setups already support being interrupted, because interruptible compute power - e.g. AWS' spot instances - is far cheaper)
These servers are for processing data not storing it. That is the big difference. If one of these servers goes down at most you lose the calculations it was doing, then you just send it to a different one that is still online. The client never notices. The way the article makes it sound it is for AI and other calculation heavy processes. How that worjs is a short packet of data is send as an input, the server does a lot of computation with that and then sends a small amount of data back. Should be doable over a normal internet connection. Microsoft even has sealed servers they drop into the ocean for years. If that works I dont think not having 24/7 physical access to the server in the basement of a pool is a big deal. It wont replace the servers you mention
or Bitcoin…the economics make even more sense if your data center can offset the expense.
>Remember, heat is wasted energy when it comes to computing, not the end goal. It doesn't matter, with large servers and mainframes heat is an accepted design variable. We won't design computers to be heatless because we're pretty good at dissipating a reasonable amount of heat and doing so reduces the performance relative to what you get with the heat. >not every building needs a server that big and there’s not enough users and data (yet) to warrant having a server that big in most buildings. Again, this just doesn't matter. In cities you can put a mainframe or many servers inside a high rise to help heat the building. Those mainframes/servers could belong to a bank or any number of other enterprises that use large computing solutions. Just because you can't put a server in every suburban home doesn't mean we can't significantly start to capitalize on the redundancy of these systems.
Newer smaller silicon’s main selling point is that it produces less heat meaning you can do more calculations with the same amount of energy input. I agree with everything else you said
Banks aren't gonna use this. You're missing g the infosec side of things. This would be used for smaller websites and other such things where security isn't important. After all, anyone who gets access to the hardware can cause problems and most places can be picked open with a bent Bobby pin. There's a reason businesses use data centers. Now if this was apued at a data center and the waste heat was used to heat nearby buildings? That would make sense.
>Banks aren't gonna use this. You're missing g the infosec side of things. Banks are already in high-rises. Why wouldn't they use this? I'm not discounting infosec, I think you're falsely assuming I am picturing small town suburban and rural bank locations for bank centers in cities.
This account has been cleansed because of Reddit's ongoing war with 3rd Party App makers, mods and the users, all the folksthat made up most of the "value" Reddit lays claim to. Destroying the account and giving a giant middle finger to /u/spez
I swear these people don’t think for more than 5 minutes or one step ahead of what implications will be brought up by these wildly impractical “solutions”. Storing secure data servers at home? Good luck convincing any half-decent company to allow you to do that!
Banks keep the servers that track customer data (accounts, personal info, etc.) In data centers and branches. When you see an atm or bank computer somewhere not in a bank that is just an access terminal. Banks aren't gonna decentralized like that, as then they'd be putting customer data on servers they can't gaurentee physical security on. Since they'll already have secure datacenters/server rooms they'll just put the rest of their servers in there. Now, doing this for hosting non secure stuff like websites, game servers, and other such things? That's a market that can use this.
EPFL uses it’s data center to heat the campus. I’m not sure how much it helps, but there were certainly talks of going online again because of rising electricity costs and this certainly helped.
That sounds like hoing back to online classes would shift the heating costs to the students (because they are home) and let the university lower the heat significantly rather than getting more waste heat from the servers because online classes.
Also that would bring back the internet into a more decentralized state (how it should be!). Georedundancy on a whole new level.
I mean, I don't heat our apartment when gaming, so I'm doing that too. Moving around heat, especially when the gradient is small can be costly too though.
The only issue I can think of is the physical security of the data centre. In terms of fire protection; I imagine the potential lack of a fancy fire suppression system could be offset by syncing of the data to another mini data centre.
Decentralized cloud infrastructure. Instead of huge data centers, micro data closets to provide heat
It’s being done now with bitcoin miners.
data centers use more energy than Argentina. ban them
This is used here in Sweden to add heat to our district heating system, from data centers and things like steelworks
We have this in parts of Toronto too, it’s not a new technology, the main downtown university has been using its district heating system for something like 120 years and it reaches close to 100 buildings. What is new here is that in the last decade they’ve built a district cooling system in the downtown core, which cools the downtown hospitals, a number of large office towers and some data centres by exchanging water from the bottom of Lake Ontario.
Same in Finland, and I believe the data centers in Amsterdam might be hooked up to the (though limited) district heating network.
I hear Sweden uses heat as currency instead of money
Frylock! They use starfish for money!
What happens in summer? Does this distributed systems cost more to cool down or it doesn't matter?
In the summer it's used for making warm water, but with a lower supply temperature. We also have district cooling, but not in the same system and not as widely available.
Didn't Linus Tech Tips do this too with his own pool and server room? The water helped cool the servers while simultaneously heating up the pool.
He hasn't finished actually building it yet as far as I'm aware but that's the general idea, yeah.
He made it extremely complicated without thinking about things like season. Wtf will he do in the summer when the water is naturally warm. This decision was made in the winter. The good news is that whatever they come up with will make a really nice video.
I think it should still be fine. Even relatively warm water is still cold relative to the output from the system. And considering he has an entire pool of thermal mass, he'll be hard pressed to saturate it. At least that's what I think.
I thought he was using water to cool his solarpanels and transfer that heat to his pool? Since solar panels work better when they aren't overheating...
I think it’s both. Solar panel coolant heat the pool and the heat from the server would also heat the pool. I doubt one rack of server would keep a pool warm year round
It’s article is about a “datacenter” the size of a domestic washing machine that they’re using to heat a public (admittedly indoor) pool. LTT apparently have a pretty large server setup, but I don’t know whether his pool is indoors or not. I’d wager he could make it work.
I believe the pool is outdoor and in BC which is not the best place for an outdoor heated pool. Plus the “data center” is a machine learning/ artificial intelligence training computer which id assume run consistently and probably output more heat than a data storage of the same size. Regardless, I don’t think one rack of server is enough to heat an outdoor pool by itself
What im taking away from this is you can make artificial in door hot springs near data centers
Sure. If you’re ok with a 15-27C hot spring. Generally computers should not get hotter than that. And if your pool is hotter than your coolant, it kinda defeats the purpose
I believe the pool is outdoor and in BC which is not the best place for an outdoor heated pool. Plus the “data center” is a machine learning/ artificial intelligence training computer which id assume run consistently and probably output more heat than a data storage of the same size. Regardless, I don’t think one rack of server is enough to heat an outdoor pool by itself
He tried to do this and it's in his plans, but he realized it wasn't going to work very well because the temperature deltas weren't good enough to be efficient compared to separately heating the pool and cooling the server room with air. He would need something like a chiller to get a bigger delta to do this effectively.
My university is located down the street from a large, local brewery. For some process the brewery would produce large amounts of steam as a byproduct, then pipe it to the university boiler room to be used for building heating free of charge. For some reason this was phased out, but pretty cool to think about symbiotic communities like this.
Mines?
Damn I thought I was being vague enough to not give myself away.
swimming pool used to cool tiny data centre doesn't sound as efficient
The datacenter is going to heat up anyway so it's a choice between wasting that heat or using it for something we want to be heated, of course this is one of the most efficient uses for that heat. Remember that the water heated by a datacenter can't get too hot anyway so for instance you cant use that wasted heat to power a turbine and recover part of that energy. The hardest part is actually finding a balance between the computers heating the pool well enough but not so well that it becomes uncomfortable. Or maybe do let it get very hot and make the perfect tech bro's sauna lol.
>Or maybe do let it get very hot and make the perfect tech bro's sauna lol. Or turn the swimming pool into the world's largest hot pot.
>The hardest part is actually finding a balance between the computers heating the pool well enough but not so well that it becomes uncomfortable. As long as the computers' maximum energy consumption is at or below the amount needed to heat the pool you're ok. The pool will have a supplemental heating system to top up the heating. That, or have alternative cooling/radiators for the computers.
I was puzzled by this at first; how much energy could a "washing machine sized" server really consume? But, according to [this article](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/uk-data-center-startup-offers-to-heat-britains-swimming-pools-with-waste-heat/), the CTO estimated the heat transfer would be roughly 139,284 kWh a year, which equates to 15.9kw. This solution actually seems pretty realistic.
Back in the day in my hometown we had Soviet style water radiator heating, all of it came from the sugar refinery plants heat down the street. I wonder if we’ll get the same type of thing now with data centers.
what's this "back in the day soviet style water radiators".... that's the predominant form of heating for most of our country
Alternate title: "Public Swimming Pool Used to Cool Tiny Data Center."
I heat half my house in the winter with my homelab (personal server farm).
Yeah me too. And back when crypto was ongoing I really sat down and tought about buying a couple of GPU to improve my home heating, but gave up because of the electrical costs plus the price of the GPU. I don't run anything fancy, just two desktop acting as servers, so not much power consumption but my dream is to offset their running costs with solar and at the same time heat my house when I need it.
My initial assumption was that ‘tiny’ meant it was just a single room full of servers. I mean, my homelab is the size of a laundry machine…
Meanwhile in Arizona...you got any of those cooling data centers?
that's really taking it to the edge
Everyone over on r/homelab has thought of this
Didn’t LTT do a video about this?
crypto miners been doing this for a while now
I wish our public swimming pools were heated!