This sort of cloud hot air could actually be useful

[Renew Deal]

I always have to account for the number of computers I have running in a room. The more computers you have, the warmer the space. Indeed, I'm pretty sure my college dorm room never used traditional heat. It wasn't necessary with the four computers that were always on.

What if we took this to the next level? We're building data center after data center, each containing thousands of servers, all generating heat. Perhaps we should move those servers out to homes that need to be heated: a win-win.

Indeed, two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper reviewed at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing: "The paper looks at how the servers -- though still operated by their companies -- could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the 'data furnace.'"
<snip>

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/sort-cloud-hot-air-could-actually-be-useful-180233

[drm604]

1. Interesting.

The companies running the virtual "data centers" would also save on the cost of the real estate they would otherwise need to house the servers.

This is sort of an extension of the idea of distributed computing, such as Boinc.

I wonder if the heat could be used for other things. Surely it can be converted (probably at a low efficiency) to electricity so that it could contribute in at least a small way in the summer.

[drm604]

2. Heat driven cooling.

Google returns a number of hits for "Heat driven cooling".

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHKZ_enUS440US440&gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=heat+driven+cooling

So maybe this could even contribute to summer cooling.

[phantom power]

3. CHC -- "Combined Heat and Computation"

:hi: