
Heating houses with high performance servers - plingamp
http://www.nerdalize.com/
======
leonroy
I'm actually inclined to take this fairly seriously.

I personally run a 36U rack of servers in my basement for learning and hosting
for my business. It gets toasty enough that the basement temperature hovers
around 30-35C.

On cold days we open the door to the basement and the warm air rises into the
ground floor, giving a bit of warmth.

On warm days I have a temperature controlled fan which vents the air to the
outside.

My house has central heating but if it had central air I'm pretty sure an
exhaust from the top of the rack to the central air unit would be do-able (not
sure what HVAC building codes I'd be compromising though).

Puget Systems did a great blog post titled 'Space Heater vs Gaming PC'. They
basically found they were tied in the efficiency of heat output from both
devices.

Source: [https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-
Spac...](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-Space-Heater-
Efficiency-511/)

------
icebraining
It's interesting. There are obvious security/integrity problems, but there is
probably plenty of not very sensitive data to process, and regarding tampered
results, if it's cheap enough, one can always process everything twice and
compare them.

That said, the eRadiator market seems to be limited to households in places
which are cold all year and which have a decent Internet connection. What does
that leave? Northern Europe?

~~~
tzs
Their FAQ says it can still work when you don't need the heat in the house:

> Will the Nerdalize Heater work during the summer?

> Yes. Our Heater can expel excess heat to the outside when the homeowner does
> not require heating. This way we can compute at full capacity during winter
> and summer utilizing our hardware optimally.

That suggests, however, that installation is more complicated than just
mounting it on a wall like you would a shelf or a picture frame and plugging
in power and network. It sounds like you'd need to have something going
through the wall to the outside.

~~~
Eridrus
They're essentially using your cooling in the summer unless it does air intake
from the outside too.

------
eloff
This is a joke right?

Unix philosophy has long been that the person with physical access to the
machine owns it. This would only be acceptable for a very specific class of
compute jobs where nobody cares if you hack them. Like computation for
charitable purposes. You could never host peoples personal or business data in
this. Furthermore bandwidth would be limited and unreliable, as would power.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Not unix, physics.

Physical access means you can directly measure things that would otherwise be
secret. Nothing stops you from reading the contents of memory wholesale, for
one simple example.

~~~
TTPrograms
A fully homomorphic encryption system would work, but I don't think we're
there yet.

~~~
rch
For some things we are, but I don't know how far along open source software is
currently. It would take a major incentive to get people to even talk openly
about what's possible in this space.

------
seltzered_
Oddly, this isn't the first startup proposing this idea, french startup Qarnot
Computing is also in this space: [http://www.qarnot-
computing.com](http://www.qarnot-computing.com)

I'm still critical of it, but it'd be interesting to see if it flies in a
constrained scenario of condos/hotels/office buildings - there's already
scenarios where data centers will take up entire floors or basements of
buildings and channel heat into the building's hvac system.

------
brotherjerky
In theory, any heat generated without computation is a waste. I'm sure it's
pretty tough to actually make that work at scale, so excited to see this!

~~~
Anansie
Nice to hear, it is tough but we believe we have figured out how to do it
effectively. Took a while and quite some prototypes/concepts to make it work.

------
martin_bech
A distributed version of this will take place in Denmark, once Apples new
datacenter is online. We have a distributed heating network in denmark, where
excess heat is "sent" to homes connected with "fjernvarme" translated "remote
heat". This new datacenter will dump its heat into the existing heating
network and will heat x homes in the neighborhod.

~~~
mmcwilliams
I think this is a much more sensible and useful implementation, where the
computation happens in a centralized location but the _heat energy_ gets
distributed. The linked solution requires CPUs to be distributed for the the
heat energy to go with them. As many other commenters post, this creates many
questions about data security.

------
andy_ppp
My 7x7 foot room at university was toasty with the combination of a GeForce 3
and Diablo 2.

------
nostromo
I get an early start on my veggi garden with a few grow lamps in my basement
each spring.

The energy is "free" because the furnace would run more without them anyway.

By the way, if you live in a cold environment and wondered why using LED bulbs
didn't make any dent in your electricity bill, it's because your furnace runs
more now without hot bulbs.

~~~
tsomctl
Only if you rely on resistive heating, which most people don't, because it is
ridiculously expensive.

~~~
xenadu02
Indeed; if you must use electricity to get heat you should use a heat pump
which is 2-3x as efficient as resistive heating. A resistive load is 100%
efficient. A heat pump moves heat from outside to inside the home so for the
same electricity you can get 200-300% efficiency. (Make sure you get a scroll
compressor though; the heat they put out is quite a bit warmer than the older
piston-style compressors).

If you're thinking this sounds a lot like an air conditioner you are correct:
Most residential heat pumps are just A/C units that can be run in reverse
during the winter. They work well so long as the ambient temperature is high
enough to allow the liquid refrigerant to evaporate (some low-temperature
models can effectively heat a home when the outdoor air is around -10 deg C /
20 deg F).

------
jdiez17
Interesting idea. There's probably some clever software involved to schedule
compute jobs onto the radiators; end users will want to regulate the heat
output. Also, they must be using some rather beefy servers to generate an
amount of heat comparable to a space heater (3kW).

~~~
thekevan
In their FAQs they say they generate 1kW.

------
bshimmin
This is, to me, absolutely indistinguishable from an April fools' day joke.

~~~
huula
You are not alone. How would they handle the dust and noise which comes so
tightly with high performance servers?

~~~
lacampbell
Don't people pay good money for machines that generate white noise to help
them sleep?

Not sure how I can spin the dust thing.

~~~
fezz
Servers don't generate dust, they collect it. Add a Hepa filter you have your
spin.

------
randyrand
network bandwidth is of course the biggest limiting factor. =/

Designing a data center with 1.5 mb/s upload between nodes would be.....not
fun.

Excited to see if they can make a business out of this.

edit: also would suck that for half the year your data center gets turned off.

~~~
Faaak
I think this is targeted to computation needs.

But on their registration page, they ask whereas you have fibre > 100Mbits/s.

~~~
Anansie
Exactly we only use fiber, 10Gbps per house

------
tbihl
More exciting than the free great is the idea of a reliable, high speed
connection.

But I live in a South facing apartment in South Carolina, so I just bake
something if my house is cold for a few hours.

------
worace
What about wall-mounted out of the box bitcoin miners? Get around the physical
access/security difficulties by making the homeowner own the machine and
capture the benefit from its computation (rather than relying on network-based
resource sharing). The economics might not really work out in the case of
bitcoin but maybe there are other applications where the value of (computation
+ heat output) would make it worthwhile.

~~~
theptip
That doesn't really get around the problem; I could install a tap upstream of
the miner, and interdict any blocks that get mined. It might even be worse
than the current model, since the value of the work being done is completely
exfiltratable (i.e. if I steal the mined block I get all the reward, whereas I
might have to work to extract value from stolen computation results).

~~~
thethirdone
> if I steal the mined block I get all the reward

How would you steal a block? Changing the target of the payment requires
recomputing the nonce.

~~~
theptip
The value is in the proof of work; just a very hard-to-compute number. All you
need to do to steal the work is to prevent the server from sending the hash to
the owner, and independently submit that proof of work elsewhere.

------
cmac2992
I've been heating my room by running stanford's folding at home. Silly but it
actually works

------
sixsevenwheels1
home version of this [http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-gets-green-light-
heat-ne...](http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-gets-green-light-heat-new-
buildings-westin-building-data-centers/)

------
annonch
this is such a good idea, it works well in the summer too

~~~
analog31
I suppose servers could be distributed worldwide, and run seasonally, except
for the population imbalance between the northern and southern hemispheres.

