In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters underground and use that energy for heating directly, and use excess to produce electricity.
Proof: https://helsinkismart.fi/case/waste-not-want-not-data-center...
You can argue that Facebook isn't actually doing anything useful, but still, it's better than to waste the generated heat.
Edit: It's should be noted that most Danish cities already have a remote heating infrastructure in place. Aside from the regulatory issues, it's mostly a question of hooking up datacenters and other heat producing industries to that infrastructure. In most places utilising the remote heating isn't voluntary, if it's available where you live, your home has to be connected.
Things like datacenters are slowly replacing coal fired heating plants, because most of those plants where made to generate electricity, but that's now supplied by more and more renewable energy. So cities need to find other sources of heat, to replace the volume no longer coming from the power plants. Where I live that's datacenters, waste incinerators and heavy industry.
As a new thing, remote cooling is now also attempted by using cold water from limepits.
It’s interesting you can also use remote cooling from lime pits.
There's a brochure from the national innovation fund that mentions a town actually covering about half of its heating needs with heat from a data center, though. [3]
Swedish telco Telia also has had similar plans for a data center in Helsinki, Finland, and their website says their "goal is to recover and reuse all the heat produced" [4], but I'm not sure how much weight to give that since proclaiming a goal only costs a few words. It would be nicer if they said what they're actually doing at the moment even if it were much less than "all of it".
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-deep-underground-data-cen...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki...
[3] https://www.sitra.fi/en/cases/district-heating-from-data-cen...
[4] https://www.telia.fi/business/telia-helsinki-data-center
https://helsinkismart.fi/case/waste-not-want-not-data-center...
Facebook has a good and bad side just like humans do. For example, if Facebook got rid of the ability to post news, it would be a much better place.
If Google and Facebook would block news on my country I wouldn't notice much.
Still, if enough people would be fed up with FB, their dominance would fade away. Well, afaik Telegram (and Signal) gained lots marketshare lateley, so lets see
There are plenty. There is no mirror corporation doing exactly the same thing under a different name. But there is no mirror to Microsoft, Google, Apple or any other large tech corp. These are corporations backed by ironclad IP laws meaning nobody can every play on exactly the same field. For something like facebook, the competitor is all things not facebook. Every time you share a new story via SMS, you are competing with facebook. Every time you send a message via email rather than via facebook you are competing with facebook. And ever time you visit a store's own website rather than their facebook page, you deny facebook a tiny bit of the world. That is the serious competitor.
But you probably don't need social media.
... which are what, exactly?
Edit: Dug around some more, looks like they're building a BOINC-like service? https://computing.qarnot.com/en/
So you, store and cool the computer for free. They probably sell directly to buildings and municipalities during construction, so it's installed and left there.
So you either just rent it for a nominal fee or pay nothing.
At the end of the day, Qarnot rents this infrastructure to other companies for computation and use the heat energy to heat stuff (air, water, warehouses, etc.). Not a bad idea.
[0]: https://greenfoldingathome.com/2020/05/25/how-to-make-a-fold...
on edit: I got a downvote so someone must think I'm wrong? the basis of my idea was - in the FAQ
https://computing.qarnot.com/en/FAQ
3D:
Blender, Maya, V-Ray, Guerilla
IA / ML / Big data or simulation:
Code Saturne FreeFem OpenFOAM PyTorch TensorFlow SickitLearn Spark
If there is a Docker image, we support the software! You can either bring your own or choose an existing one on Docker Hub. You can also ask our experts for help!
I expected the 3D stuff put up top made it the most used, but could be wrong in that. Obviously also some data crunching, ML tasks, but at any rate if my answer was wrong and so off base as to get a downvote maybe you could also just say why I'm wrong and what it's generally used for?
on second edit: developer documentation https://computing.qarnot.com/en/developers/overview/qarnot-c... made me think that maybe if you have one you can get your own api token and put your stuff on it, obviously you would have to pay them for that so not sure how it would work.
on edit: I do sometimes also get paranoid and think, man there is just someone who doesn't like me and automatically downvote when they run across my name!
I've also hit voting arrows a lot whilst scrolling (on mobile) and must not have caught that every single time.
It certainly can feel like that sometimes. I rarely enjoy posting here anymore as a result. The fact a single downvote can inhibit your comment's visibility and negatively bias its progression is silly.
The unsettling part is it feels like there's very little stopping individuals and organizations from weaponizing that dynamic. Anything from targeted sustained psychological distress to censorship is possible with the current scheme.
If it's something I disagree, and worth discussing, I set aside five minutes to write a good reply instead. I think it's much more constructive.
Making the proof of work do “useful” things would lower the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an attack.
PoW requires that a block's solution proves that the solver had access to the previous block.
> This results in PoWs whose completion does not waste energy but instead is useful for the solution of computational problems of practical interest.
This 31 page paper most definitely has not been fully evaluated by anyone commenting on it in this thread.
How does this follow? If the work is so universally useful that it lowers the cost of the work, it lowers the cost for everyone. Not just "attackers", but "defenders" as well.
As it happens, Bitcoin miners mine not out of the goodness of their hearts but for financial profit. Bitcoin POW is "useful" to them: It gives them more money than they put in. They do it precisely because the cost of said work is lower than the returns.
This work is useless to you and me (thus the only extracted value would be the reward from mining), but might be useful to someone who's got hashes to crack (so they get extra value out of the same process). In this case, the latter party can enjoy a 51% attack at a fraction of the cost of the former.
But I wonder what would happen with such a system in the summer? For example in most on France it gets pretty cold for long enough every year that having a proper heating system and good insulation makes financial sense. But during the summer it's pretty hot, especially in cities. While the heating can be turned off between March and October (give or take), Facebook & co would probably like their DC to keep on working, so to keep on heating, year round.
Interesting idea to combine it with larger heating than to heat a room or two. Many will probably argue that it is an ineffective way to create heat without also looking at the benefits from the work done
Electrical heating is as close to 100% efficient as you can get. Every watt your computer uses ends up as heat.
Generating those watts from non-renewable sources is much less efficient though.
I wonder if it's possible to calculate when the benefit of contributing to BOINC projects outweighs the CO2 generated.
Heat pumps engage some other source of energy so if you want to measure efficiency you now need to include that other source into account.
Since you are engaging natural source of energy you can measure how effective (not efficient in thermodynamical terms) your heat pump system is, by calculating how much energy it can transfer for energy put into the pump. But this has nothing to do with efficiency, which in case of devices used to convert one type of energy into another or moving energy from place to place is typically meant in its strict thermodynamical sense.
The work of the heat pump is to move heat from one location to another, it does so with the byproduct of producing more heat, therefore it produces more heat energy than the electrical energy put in.
You’re right that conservation of energy says that the heat in being moved did come from somewhere but that’s outside the system, and you will always find heat anywhere but absolute zero. Calculations for turbines or engines don’t make any efficiency allotments for heat already in the air, which is also necessary for them to run.
Heat pump is a closed system in which you store energy when it is hot and recover it when it is cold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
Heat pump is not just the pump mechanism, but the entire system which includes mass of rock that is heat reservoir.
What typically happens is you drill deep in the ground or rock and circulate air, water or some other refrigerant underground. During summer you pump hot refrigerant to heat up the mass of rock. This can be for example water that has been made hot by the sun. During winter you push water through that warm rock to recover the heat to warm your home.
No, it is not thermodynamically possible to recover more than 100% of stored energy.
https://www.finehomebuilding.com/2020/04/08/how-efficient-ar...
Also, what would you do in the summer?
- All newly build housing in the Netherlands must be without natural gas, thus either lower heat-grid or heat pump heating - People that use airconditioning for heating have a heat pump without being aware of it (if configured that way)
Finally, for any technology early in the adoption curve, the market share - or even the growth rate (%) - today shouldn't be taken as good indicators for future development. E.g. McKinsey famously underestimated the mobile phone market by 100x that way [1] and the energy predictions on the adoption of solar manage to underestimate installed solar power _every_ year. Instead, also consider growth-of-growth and network effects as adoption grows.
[1]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38716/did-mckin...
But alas, it has to be said.
No, you can't create perpetuum mobile ie. build a machine that given a supply of energy produces as much or even more energy.
Assume your datacenter runs at 50C (122F) and the temperature outside is -40C (-40F), using the datacenter heat to generate electricity has theoretical maximum efficiency of 27.85%. If your datacenter is at 23C (73F) and room temp is 0C (32F), then the theoretical maximum is 7.77%. Note the word 'theoretical maximum', in reality probably at least 10 times worse than that.
Newer generations of CPUs are going to be exchange less frequently but will produce more energy as they offer more dense computing. This makes case for investing more in the server hardware.
Even then understand, that 7% of a huge amount of energy is still huge amount of energy.
Edit: Apparently "Facebook datacenter in Denmark is supplying around 10.000 homes with heating" -- source, another poster.
So... you need to rethink your expertise on defining what is and what is not viable.
The problem with this ~100% efficiency is that, if your goal is heating, you can move way more than 100% heat with 100% electrical energy if you use, say, a heat pump.
First, transporting heat as opposed to electricity is very wasteful, so you only want to transport it in very short distances.
Second, typically even small single family home requires quite large volume to store the heat effectively for many months. It isn't that complex only because in a single family home setting you already have a bunch of uncontested land available so you can use the volume that is relatively flat and not too deep.
Building this on a scale of a city would be insurmountable challenge. You would have to dig deeper than the buildings are high and any kind of works like that are difficult in urban areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
The first sentence:
"A heat pump is a device that transfers heat energy from a source of heat to what is called a thermal reservoir."
So yes, it involves energy storage.
The way this works is you store heat in the summer (warm up a lot of rock or ground underneath your house) and recover that energy in the winter by pumping a liquid through warm rock back to your house and use it as a heat source.
> While air conditioners and freezers are familiar examples of heat pumps, the term "heat pump" is more general and applies to many heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) devices used for space heating or space cooling.
Basically what I would understand from the term heat pump in ordinary conversation would be an air conditioner intended for use in a heating dominated climate rather than a cooling dominated one, but there might be some regional differences in usage.
You can use geothermo (ground) to work around this. I'd recommend it, but the one time install costs mean it is questionable if it is cost effective.
If you calculate 1000 digits of pi, those digits will not embody any energy.
But on the other side, you want the heater to regulate temperature (not overheat the room) by switching itself off as needed.
You can have both only if you either waste energy (vent it to outside) or have a thermal storage. It is already existing technology i.e. for electric heaters that accumulate heat using cheap night electricity and slowly release it during the day. Or water boilers. But they are bulky and can only store several hours worth of heat.
I think we could even design processors differently if heat was not part of the equation. Right now it's all about perf-per-watt, which gives up absolute speed.
Also it would be fun to say "It was so cold that night, <x>" like "I could raytrace in realtime" or "I mined 1 bitcoin" or "crysis ran 10,000fps"
The current trial is actually residential water heaters, by heating the water using excess green power during the day you effectively store that energy as heat and that water then gets used later that night or early morning for showers/baths/washing etc.
Another example is a more obvious one, which is electric cars and other large battery appliances. The ultimate goal is to get these appliances talking to the grid directly, so that they know when to draw power and when to idle.
https://www.energyrating.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-01/...
The issue is building consensus protocol (in this case consensus that a transaction happened or did not happen).
There exist no physics law that says that achieving this requires burning extraordinary amounts of energy.
You say that like the conversation is resolved?
Everyone except bitcoin bagholders can see that the BTC proof-of-work protocol is obscenely wasteful. There are already superior cryptocurrencies that use different consensus algorithms and have similar or better security/anonymity properties.
This is plenty achievable given that banking, which is far more complicated and messy, works. It doesn't not require a small country's energy usage to achieve human consensus.
BTC is super cool having created an pseudoanonymous digital voting system that's resistant to ballot stuffing but we're allowed to make stronger assumptions for our financial systems.
Even if you own crypto, I'm guessing you have a bunch of money in other assets in accounts managed by financial institutions. How often has the bank just decided that you don't own that?
Bitcoin and other non-inflationary proof-of-work coins need to switch to proof-of-stake if they want any hope of longevity.
Every week you pick up your 10kg block of bauxite and exchange it for aluminum.
Not sure how much byproduct heat is actually involved though...
SETI@home doesn't pay.
When it finally slows down (if ever) what will all of that hardware be used for?
From a heating perspective, there is basically zero demand for the kind of year-round low-quality heating a data center can produce. From a computing perspective, rare and uncontrollable bursts of computing power aren't desirable either and is a waste of hardware.
The article should be considered an edge case. The author already had hardware lying around for free and required zero usable computation. An in-ground heat buffer wasn't an option. Longevity of the hardware was irrelevant. Heat demand was quite small.
Does it work for a single person? Sure, why not! Will it work on a city-wide scale? Highly unlikely.
I live in Europe and I would say that heating IS life or death problem whereas cooling isn't.
See, there is this thing that is called hypothermia and if you take a look at the map and find where it is possible to die of hypothermia vs where it is possible to die of overheating, the number of people that live in places that require heating is much more than number of people that live in places that require cooling.
That may change in the future.
You know, humanity has this huge issue of CO2 in atmosphere, maybe you have heard of it?
We are building more and more renewable sources, but cryptocurrency mining is countering these benefits to a considerable extent.
Additionally, even if we are able to produce 100% energy from renewable sources it still requires energy to scrub carbon from our atmosphere and so any energy put in bitcoin could be used for like saving our planet.
yes, it is exhausting
Miners are required to provable expend effort in order to become eligible to produce a block. 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism, as it cannot be reversed.
If you were to improve efficiency by routing excess heat for other purposes, it will gradually spread across the entire mining industry, and eventually you end up right where we started.
And that for something that’s almost exclusively used for speculation, because for anything else transactions costs are too high...
Hell, dont pay people, if I was mining and it was similar costs to donate the wasted energy I’d do it.
What matters is the % of miners that are honest. (See bitcoin.pdf)
High hashrate just means higher difficulty. (The difficulty controls the average time between blocks, so it's always targeting to be 10 min on average).
Also, for heating your home, mining bitcoin could end you up with a loss. For example, your heater needs an internet connection, and your heater is will become out-of-date very quickly as new more advanced bitcoin mining gear becomes available. You would also need to have your heater on 24/7 to break even, this it will cost you to turn off the mining heater due to warm weather or to cool it.
Not to mention the noise.
Honesty isn’t the issue, collusion is. The entire concept of Bitcoin assumes dishonest players.
The only real attack is for miners to combine hash power to get over 50% of the network hash rate so they can execute double spends - and even that is self defeating as doing so degrades confidence and by extension price.
They've happened on smaller chains that don't have much hash power attached to them, but even there, they're caught very quickly.
What is more secure in your view?
hashrate is absolutely necessary for high security.
Section 6 about incentives discusses about why nodes may be honest rather than collude to attack the system. This is the main pillar of bitcoin's security.
LOL... this is the most ridiculous claim I've heard about crypto-mining yet. Might as well buy a truck-full of wine glasses, break them and use the shards of broken glass to prove that I've "expended effort". Now we're using the asymmetry of time itself as a security mechanism. Come to think of it, that may be actually less wasteful than burning the electricity to mine Bitcoin.