We’ve entered a world where computationally-intense tasks can be offloaded to the cloud. Why build out and manage a computing farm when you can just ask Amazon to do it for you? Heavy duty computing is becoming just another utility.
That “cloud” is actually made up of racks and racks of servers. Those servers are not actually in the clouds, where it is quite cold, but down on the earth, where it’s warm and getting warmer. Those racks of servers generate heaps of thermal energy, which requires yet more energy to keep cool. Otherwise they melt onto one another like Hersheys in the glovebox.
The software architecture that makes these clouds of servers work is modular, and fault-tolerant and distributed. They allow plug-and-play expansion when more capacity is needed. They are built to withstand any node failing (with thousands of servers, several will break down every day).
And those nodes can be anywhere, since everything is connected. But given a choice, it’s preferable to put them close to where they are needed, because things are faster that way.
The purpose of a space heater is to generate heat. Heaters are pretty dumb. That’s all they do. They have an electric heating element, maybe some oil to circulate through and some fins to radiate the heat, a thermostat and that’s it.
What if a space heater instead had a bunch of cheap, older generation, heat-generating CPUs and a wireless connection? You could crank up the number of processors and their clock speed for a nice cozy hearth, or turn them down a few GHz if you just needed to keep your nose from freezing overnight.
The cloud computing companies could even give you a few cents for each MIPS-hour your heater burns.
At a larger scale, an entire office floor could have computers built into its HVAC system. Even our desktop computers could be enlisted for the job. They are ridiculously overpowered for what we need them for most of the time anyway. The building’s climate control system could instruct all those idle CPUs to do something productive with their downtime, while warming the office in the winter. Those computers could even monitor the local temperature and provide more heat where it is most needed.
All of this would:
- do something productive in the process of heating your home or office
- reduce the cost of cooling servers
- distribute computing closer to where it is needed
- maybe control temperature in a breezy office to a finer degree
- maybe subsidize heating costs by donating cycles to the cloud
My wife, tactfully: “I think you have an idea that is ahead of its time.”
Yes, it could be a while before this idea is stolen. [This would be a fun and compelling research project for some engineering & system design students. Anyone?]
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, an innovation consultancy that helps guide product leaders and their teams to generate ideas even more important than the Network Heater. To follow him on Twitter click here.
Great idea! I like it! I have heard Google uses vast amounts of power for bare motherboards to power their web crawling. Maybe they could do some cloud computing and let the heat warm our toes.
Consider this idea stolen I guess – http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article7022488.ece
Thanks for that link Andy. Fascinating:
• “Data centres consume vast amounts of energy — about 3 per cent of all the electricity generated in Britain, for example. About two-thirds of the total is used simply for cooling.”
• “Global emissions of carbon dioxide from data centres are now equivalent to about a third of the total from aviation and are rising by 10 per cent per year.”