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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

A half rack server in a basement isn’t going to consume a lot of power or generate that much noise. I have home servers and they are fine.

Data protection is an issue, but maybe this is something that SGX and family can provide eventually.

A scheme like this makes a lot of sense for distributed redundant backups.

The real problem is bandwidth. Most home users still don’t have decent symmetrical bandwidth. If you could solve this, then home servers could provide a handful of edge services to others in the area. I’m not sure where this makes sense versus local colo though.

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I've had a half rack in my home for many years -- if it's half empty, half powered off, and half full of low powered stuff, then it's not going to consumer a lot of power. (e.g. 'only' a few hundred watts) But 20u of 1u virtualization servers filled up -- or a single Nvidia DGX -- would easily overwhelm a normal home electrical system. The kind of workloads in datacenters are not people homelabbing for fun, but people running production workloads.

> A half rack server in a basement isn’t going to consume a lot of power or generate that much noise. I have home servers and they are fine.

I have home servers, designed for home and they are not too bad, and I can turn them off when sleeping for example.. It's very different with a 20U server running and spinning non stop. Not many people will have the soundproofing to simply not hear it at night.

I don't know, I wouldn't see it working, but I'm just one.

A half rack in a rack of last decade is 8kw. A half rack of today's state of the art is 100kw.

A house older than 30 years typically has 100A 120V split phase power which can supply 25000 watts (you wouldn't want to ever fully load it...)

And an 8000 watt space heater will definitely be noisy, and produce too much heat for pretty much any house.

Part of the problem with current data centers is the density. To make the economics work, you need excessive density, which comes with power, noise, and water requirements.

Smaller servers distributed more widely don’t come with the same requirements. They can’t handle all use cases, but something like a Tinybox can run consumer LLM tasks just fine, a SAN with a small server can provide backup storage or storage for CDNs, etc. No need to turn the house into a full data center.

The key would be to build highly efficient small servers that can work as an appliance. It would need to be very easy to swap them out when one fails.

Again, I’m not sure this has much of a benefit except for providing geographical dispersion. Data centers would still be more cost effective. Maybe it would be helpful for providing local services in small remote areas like islands.

A Bitcoin mining node is the simplest possible way to turn compute into money. Very minimal storage and bandwidth requirements. And yet we still do not see those in houses.

Everything about doing productive computing tasks in houses is more complicated than that! At least it is more profitable, I think?

(I wonder what a rough profit per watt figure is for a datacenter. Very much "it depends" I'm sure.)

The density of data centers provides efficiency gains -- if you take the same workload from a high density nvidia DGX setup in a data center and instead distribute it to Tinyboxes running residentially, you'd have an overall net gain in energy use.

Yes, along with additional costs for managing and servicing a distributed set of devices and extra redundancy needed for higher expected downtime. But maybe the cost is worth it for some application.

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