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posted by martyb on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the cool-use-of-hot-tech dept.

BBC News has an article about "nerd power" in the form of heat from datacenters being harnessed to warm homes and businesses:

Ask Jerry van Waardhuizen about his new radiator and you get an excited response. "I'm very enthusiastic," he says. "It's a beautiful thing." The sleek white box, which has been hugging his wall for two weeks, looks nice enough as radiators go. But what's really got Waardhuizen excited is what's going on inside.

Instead of hot water, it contains a computer connected to the internet, doing big sums and kicking out heat in the process. It was created by a Dutch start-up called Nerdalize, and could be part of a solution to a big problem for the tech industry.

We talk about data being "virtual" and stored on a "cloud". In fact, those clouds take the form of very large, noisy data centres containing tens of thousands of servers. To prevent the server stacks overheating, tech companies spend vast sums on cooling technology - more than a third of a data centre's hefty energy bill may go on air conditioning. With data centres estimated to account for 1.5% of global electricity consumption (in 2010), this wastage is costly to businesses and to the environment too.

Nerdalize's solution is, effectively, to spread their data centre across domestic homes linked by fibre-optic cable. The excess heat can then be used instead of going to waste.

The radiators take a little longer than average to heat up - about an hour, Waardhuizen says - and a single unit won't be enough to heat a room in mid-winter. But, after a small set-up fee, the heat is completely free to users. Nerdalize gets its money for providing data services. During this year-long pilot, its clients include Leiden University Medical Centre, which uses the radiators to crunch through lengthy protein and gene analysis.

Mentioned are Nerdalize, a 2011 paper by Microsoft Research and the University of Virginia (pdf), Facebook's Lulea, Sweden datacenter, Bahnhof, Iceotope, and the Westin Building sharing heat with Amazon's headquarters in Seattle.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by gman003 on Monday May 25 2015, @02:54AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Monday May 25 2015, @02:54AM (#187482)

    ARM is only low-power because it's low-performance. A well-designed ARM core on the same process node as an x86 core, with a similar performance target, will have about the same power consumption. Compare eg. A8X to Bay Trail.

    Of course top-end x86 cores are less efficient - they can compute circles around any ARM core out there. That's not a fact of the architecture - if AMD's ARM proc is performance-competitive with their x86 offerings, it will also have comparable power consumption.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 25 2015, @11:50AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 25 2015, @11:50AM (#187576)

    That brings up stereotypical design issues, such as is your data center even remotely CPU limited or is it I/O limited? If its I/O limited then weaker lower power CPUs is a great idea. If its CPU limited because you're mining bitcoins or something, then its the other way around and you need fast processors.

    For a long time (a decade or so) I used a 486 desktop as an internet firewall. Compared to a contemporary P3 processor it wasn't very impressive, but CPU use never got very high per my monitoring and I was always upstream limited. I have an embedded 586 doing the job now (a soekris box). As long as I'm I/O limited using a weak processor simply doesn't matter. Of course if gigabit fiber ever came to my area then I'd probably end up CPU limited and need to upgrade.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @01:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @01:59PM (#187606)

      Profitably mining bitcoin on a GP processor? I believe that ship sailed at least 2 years ago.c

  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:23PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:23PM (#189392)

    ARM is only low-power because it's low-performance.

    this is incorrect. just check out this poor battery life [anandtech.com] on this x86 smartphone which has far worse performance than it's ARM counterparts [anandtech.com] which have smaller batteries!

    you clearly aren't in the silicon design biz or you would already know how bad x86 is by nature.