Heating houses with high performance servers
nerdalize.com
nerdalize.com
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...
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?
> 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.
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.
If you open the case, the system deletes the keys and you can say bye-bye to your contract.
tl;dr - modern physical security is much more than microswitches.
This seems like a very challenging environment for tamper detection.
See, that's the problem every time this comes up (and it's come up about as often as micropayments). By the time you get done accounting for the unreliability, hostile end-users, lack of access, customer support, low-grade obsolete inefficient un-fixable infrastructure, increased avenues for attack, duplicate processing, super-high latency, super-low bandwidth etc, you've created something that's several times slower, more expensive, more unreliable, more complex, and harder to upgrade than if you'd just stuck it all in a datacenter where you don't have to propose insane mechanisms like double your computations.
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.
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.
We Germans have that, too - Fernwärme :)
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.
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).
For most of us, forced air is far more efficient than lightbulbs spewing heat up into the attic.
Not sure how I can spin the dust thing.
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.
But on their registration page, they ask whereas you have fibre > 100Mbits/s.
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.
How would you steal a block? Changing the target of the payment requires recomputing the nonce.