

Microsoft suggests heating your home with “data furnaces” - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90992-microsoft-suggests-heating-your-home-with-data-furnaces

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frobozz
As others have said, summer is the problem. Even in the fairly chilly parts of
the world where people live, one typically doesn't need to heat ones home in
the summer. At least not much, and only on unseasonably cold days. However,
people still need year-round hot water for washing themselves and their
posessions.

That said, I doubt that the summer domestic requirement for hot water is
anything like the possible output of an economically scaled data furnace.

Instead, I'd suggest heating municipal or club swimming pools and preheating
water or air for showers, hammams and saunas at spas and leisure centres.
These need year-round heating, even in warmer parts of the world.

Another possibility would be to house datacentres in areas of high population
density, and pipe warm water from there to nearby homes and businesses. Just
like the District Heating Schemes of urban power stations.

Both of these latter solutions fix the security, access, and last-mile
problems. They can also even out the seasonal demand problem by not attempting
to provide all the heat and hot water.

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jimktrains2
I used to work at a supercomputing center. The building where the machines
where housed had offices above it (they were housed in a nuclear research
facility, so security was already high) and the building management had to
turn the heaters on twice: once to test them and once when we had all the
machines down for a while for major across-the-board upgrades.

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Thieum22
"The main problem with Data Furnaces, of course, is physical security."

*The main problem with Data Furnaces, of course, is summer.

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raganwald
Imagine, if you will, that you have a computing furnace. When you turn it on,
it makes itself available to the cloud. You receive credit for the cycles
used, enough to pay for the electricity it consumes. On hot days, you turn it
off.

This seems very much like having your own windmill connected to the grid. In
the case of computing furnaces, there would be more capacity in the winter and
at night. But at some point when bandwidth and hardware become cheap enough,
these would be feasible even if they don't run 24/7/365.

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kevinchen
The problem is, what if somebody stores their data in your server, and then
you decide to turn it off? Will the data have to be automatically mirrored on
several other servers (inefficient) or will it have to be mirrored when you
want to shut off your computing furnace (slow)?

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raganwald
In my future, all data is distributed P2P like torrents, as is all
computation. The only correct architecture for a server is that to turn it
off, you simply turn it off :-)

But I was thinking more about computation than data, even though the article
author is thinking of data. So EC2, not S3.

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baconner
This is hilariously impractical. Who is going to service these things? When
summer hits can you stand a huge hit in processing power when everyone turns
their servers off?

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molbioguy
_In exchange for providing power to the rack, home and office owners will get
free heat and hot water_ \-- from the article

This only makes sense for the commercial data center that is already using the
electricity to power the rack. For homeowners, this is like using electric
space heaters, which is very expensive. Not a good deal. And as @Thieum22
pointed out, what about summer?

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aquark
I really have to wonder if the (original) author thought about that line when
he wrote it! It is an interesting definition of 'free'.

There is a reason people don't choose to put in electric heating when other
options are available..

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Symmetry
That's why I overclock my desktop and start using Foling@Home in the winter.

