German company wants to turn cloud computing into distributed heating
November 30, 2014
Grazed from ScientificAmerican. Author: Melissa C. Lott.
A German company wants to turn server farms into “distributed cloud heaters.” By spreading computing power across a number of buildings, the company believes that it can provide reliable computing services while increasing the energy efficiency of these notoriously wasteful centers.
Server farms currently use about 30 billion Watts of electricity each year around the globe – the equivalent of about 30 nuclear power plants worth of energy. As global demand for websites, e-mail, and Internet commerce continues to grow, this number is rising more quickly than any other part of the building sector. To make matters worse, computing hubs are notorious for their low energy efficiency, frequently wasting 80-90% of the electricity that they take from the power grids…
Cloud & Heat Technologies GmbH (“Cloud & Heat”) hopes to turn this reputation around, recovering wasted energy from servers. The company is primarily focused on providing cloud-computing services. But, instead of building a large, centralized server farm to crunch their clients’ numbers, they are hoping to distribute this computing power across a large number of commercial buildings – in particular, those with hot water heaters…
Read more from the source @ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2014/11/30/germans-want-to-turn-cloud-computing-into-distributed-heating/