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posted by hubie on Friday March 17 2023, @10:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-pee-in-the-data-center dept.

Tiny data center makes for a comfortable swim:

A data center about the size of a washing machine is being used to heat a public swimming pool in England.

Data centers' servers generate heat as they operate, and interest is growing in finding ways to harness it to cut energy costs and offset carbon emissions.

In this latest example, the computing technology has been placed inside a white box and surrounded by oil, which captures the heat before being pumped into a heat exchanger, according to a BBC report.

The setup is effective enough to heat a council-run swimming pool in Exmouth, about 150 miles west of London, to about 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) for about 60% of the time, saving the operator thousands of dollars. And with energy costs rising sharply in the U.K., and councils looking for ways to save money, an initiative like this could be the difference between the pool staying open and closing down.

Behind the idea is U.K.-based tech startup Deep Green. In exchange for hosting its kit, Deep Green installs free digital boilers at pools and pays for the energy that they use. Meanwhile, tech firms pay Deep Green to use its computing power for various artificial intelligence and machine learning projects.

Related:
    Commercial Underwater Datacenter Goes Online This Year
    Microsoft's Underwater Server Experiment Resurfaces After Two Years
    Heating Homes and Businesses with "Data Furnaces"


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by rondon on Friday March 17 2023, @12:27PM (3 children)

    by rondon (5167) on Friday March 17 2023, @12:27PM (#1296668)

    Exposing a bit of my ignorance here, but don't you think the start-up will have planned and accounted for obsolescence? Or is there a factor related to servers and money that I'm missing?

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 17 2023, @01:41PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday March 17 2023, @01:41PM (#1296677)

    >start-up will have planned and accounted for obsolescence?

    Only if they have experienced and disciplined investors, which is not the majority of startups.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2023, @06:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2023, @06:23PM (#1296919)
      Experienced startup investors would have successfully hyped it and sold off their shares to some suckers.

      It's like those pyramid schemes - get in early and sell off to people who think they'd manage to sell it off to others.

      The weird one is Discord not selling to Microsoft. Normally the game plan is to start up a comms thingy, make it difficult for the NSA to spy on it, get popular and sell off to an NSA partner.
  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Monday March 20 2023, @12:52PM

    by ledow (5567) on Monday March 20 2023, @12:52PM (#1297156) Homepage

    Most workplaces don't plan for obsolescence, I see no reason that a startup that will have likely tried to sell out by that point will have bothered.

    Profit plan to investors: up, up, up for the next 5 years.
    Profit plan that's actually true: Year 6 will cost us as much as the startup costs were, but without funding, as we have to replace almost all our kit as it's barely worth running any more.

    Hell, I'll be amazed if they've even taken account of recent electricity price fluctuations, let alone future ones.

    In-house people are replacing their kit all the time and barely because it's "obsolete" so much as users want shiny hardware.
    These people are professing to sell *performance* that in-house people can't obtain. That's a constant stream of upgrades.

    And they are paying for the kit, the racking, the pool integration, the installation, the maintenance AND the electricity for these machines.
    And their income is: whatever people are willing to pay for the processing, i.e. competing with AWS and similar services.

    This is just an expensive way to run a datacenter that you can't get access to most of the time (i.e. when the pool is closed, you aren't going to be able to get near your equipment), competing against the big boys.

    No way that they've factored in that stuff *openly* because investors would run a mile.