Would you heat your home with a data furnace?
November 27, 2011
Data centers give off heat, a lot of it. At least half the cost of a data center is the cost to cool the servers. With all of that heat going to waste, researchers at the University of Virginia and Microsoft Research wrote a paper suggesting that data centers broken down into data furnaces would make great whole house heaters and still save corporations money.
According to The New York Times, the paper, The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing was presented at a recent Usenix conference. Basically, your home could become a mini data center with one to three cabinets of servers hooked up to your heating fans and duct work…
Each cabinet could have slots for, say, 40 motherboards — each one counting as a server. In the coldest climate, about 110 motherboards could keep a home as toasty as a conventional furnace does.
So what happens with the heat in the summer? It gets vented outside. Only when temperatures rose above 95 degrees would problems arise. Once it got to 95 degrees, the servers would have to be shut down.
Of course, the electricity for the data furnaces would be paid by the corporations who actually owned and used the servers. They would also have total control of all information contained on and transferred to and from the data furnace. Believe it or not, the corporations would save money paying to heat your house with their servers.
Let’s just say that Frank Developer decides that he will use the data furnace idea in his next subdivision. All of the homes will come equipped with data furnaces provided by Big Cloud Corp. So Frank builds 50 homes all with data furnaces provided by and powered by Big Cloud.
Better yet, the data center heat could be used to heat water for radiant floor heating and all the hot water the family could want. Heck, if Frank plans it right, an upscale suburb complete with heated pools during the winter courtesy of Big Cloud’s servers.
Winters are nice and toasty but summers could become a bit problematic. All the data furnace heat vented out of the homes would be vented out of 50 homes within the same subdivision. Depending on how closely the homes were built, it could make outside activities even hotter than a normal summer day.
Most pools don’t need to be heated during the summer and neither do most back yards. That could pose problems especially if air conditioning bills in the subdivision rise higher than expected. Would Big Cloud be willing to pay those costs?
The idea is probably workable in the right environment. At least one person mentioned in the article would like to give it a try, “Winston Saunders, a physicist who serves as an alternate board member of the Green Grid,”
“I’ve got a little house in the middle of the Oregon mountains.” he said. “I have baseboard electric heaters in it right now that cost me a fortune to run. What if I had a ‘baseboard data center’? It would just sit there and produce the same amount of heat with the same amount of electricity. But it would also do computing, such as decoding DNA, analyzing protein structures or finding a cure for cancer.”
Of course, some servers only store twitter messages and email but one can only hope.
So would you be willing to try out a data furnace for your home?