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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: 2) by istartedi on Monday May 25 2015, @10:10PM

    by istartedi (123) on Monday May 25 2015, @10:10PM (#187755) Journal

    As someone who already heats with electric, it's expensive.
    It doesn't work that well either. When I really want some heat in
    here, I start burning *wood*. Now I realize that my electric+wood
    approach isn't common; but in the past I had gas and wouldn't even
    think of using electricity.

    Conceptually, the idea of having an electric heater with a "lottery"
    component from mining crypto-currencies or something sounds
    appealing. In practice though I think the cost of a mining rig ($1000s?)
    vs. a $40 space heater wouldn't work out, and lotteries are... lotteries.
    Isn't that about where we are with crypto-currency mining? It's pretty
    much impossible now for a kilowatt (about what my space heater
    consumes) to bring home decent Bitcoin, rigtht?

    Anyway, next winter I'm pretty sure I'll be throwing on another log
    for heat as opposed to checking my heater's log files.

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