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Using electricity for heating is blasphemous. Electricity is a low-entropy resource and you could do a lot of wonderful things with it before turning it into a high-entropy resource (heat).
In the mean time, the fact that many poor ederly people in the UK cannot afford to heat their homes (often because
they only have expensive electric heating) is disgraceful.
I envision a charity. This charity purchases server racks and small supercomputing clusters (with about 50 CPUs each). The racks are equipped with a liquid-cooling cycle and a fridge-style radiator at the back.
The charity installs the racks in the living rooms of needy OAPs, along with gigabit fiber internet connections (though in some cases, such as numerical computations, normal ADSL might suffice). It then acts as a web hosting/ number crunching company and rents out the server space/ CPU cycles to anyone who needs it. Costumers could be anything from bloggers to drug companies who need to compute the latest protein structure.
Each rack would produce about 5000 W worth of free heat 24/7, enough to keep a poorly insulated house cosy warm. Room temperature can be controlled by opening windows. Of course, the pensioners in question would need to agree to receive frequent visits from the charity's sys admins, but most would probably welcome the company.
The beauty of this idea is that the charity may well break even, in other words it doesn't need to rely on donations or taxpayers' money to keep pensioners warm.
Southampton Community Energy Scheme
http://www.energysa..._southampton_cs.pdf
[mecotterill, Aug 09 2008]
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"It it me, or is it cold in here?"
"It is, pet. 'Ang on, I'll throw another
nonlinear turbulent flow problem on the
server." |
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I thought this might be an oversized
abacus with heated balls.... |
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/Electricity is a low-entropy resource and you could do a lot of wonderful things with it before turning it into a high-entropy resource / |
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well said. I like. Even if supercomputers are not the answer there must be some solution along these same lines. But I thought folks burned peat to keep warm in the UK? |
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This is a top-notch idea. Maybe a self-contained unit? The Seti-@-heater? |
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Good idea [+] but I have gas heating. Can I have a radiator-sized unit that includes a gas engine, generator and processors? Exhaust and networking can run alongside the existing plumbing. I'll learn to live with the noise if I get a free raytracing farm. |
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This is brilliant. Co-locate server farms and retirement homes. Maybe the server farm could be down in the basement along with the HVAC equipment, so you still get proper control over what heat is put where. |
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But what if you want to do hard sums in the middle of Summer? |
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"But what if you want to do hard sums in the middle of Summer?" |
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Good point. But British summers are only above 28C for about two weeks, at most. And that is usually the time when most people are on holiday. |
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Though I don't understand all the technical talk, it seems like a wonderful idea, so +. |
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Distributing server farms like this could also have some resilience and security advantages.
To avoid cups of tea geting split in sensitive computer equipment and to avoid jealousies over who's got the latest model of Sun 8000 Blades I propose that the racks are supplied in sealed units.
The only downside of this might be that my gran would have a faster internet connection than me.
//But what if you want to do hard sums in the middle of Summer?// - put the (waterproof) server rack in your pool or hot tub. |
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Trying to think of a catchy name
- Cray DLE to the grave -
but failing miserably. |
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I like. A friend of mine part-baked this years ago. He wanted to heat his garage, but was worried about the cost. So he bought an old AS400 (mainframe type machine), plonked it in the corner, and plugged it in. Within a few hours, the garage was toasty warm. (+) |
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//Using electricity for heating is
blasphemous// [+] |
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"Costumers could be anything from
bloggers to drug companies who need
to compute the latest protein
structure." |
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Yes, you got to watch those pesky BBC
period drama types, I always suspected
they were up to something sinister. |
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Why not just give every pensioner a PS3
and a Plasma TV, should do the job
nicely, but who pays for the electricity
anyway? And isn't the server just
converting electricity into heat anyway,
I thought you said that was bad? |
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There's a project in Southampton UK
called something like the 'community
energy scheme' or something where
they have a reasonably small building
with a heat exchange engine that heats
up water, produces electricity and
burns waste. It's very small scale but is
more economical than individual units
in lots of buildings. Maybe they could
include the server idea. |
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// the server just converting electricity into heat anyway // |
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No, that's the whole point. The electricity is doing useful "work" (powering the servers) and the by-product, the "waste" heat, is being re-used". |
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[+] for anything that involves invasive computational technology. |
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