30 is the temperature given in the article. I thought it was a little high, but that's what they're saying *shrug*.
The heat generated by a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a Devon public swimming pool
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30 is the temperature given in the article. I thought it was a little high, but that's what they're saying *shrug*.
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I hate articles like this & on the basis of the lack of detail, would agree that it is more likely to be misleading than not.
Just tell us 1) the power consumption of this washing machine sized magic box of computers (& associated running costs) & 2) the heat output
Just tell us 1) the power consumption of this washing machine sized magic box of computers (& associated running costs) & 2) the heat output
It can certainly get toasty, just having a look at one of our servers which runs pretty much under load 24/7, the inlet ambient temperature is a cool 16C which is the A/V supplying to a contained zone in front of the server. The hottest point at the back is 64C, so that's quite a jump in temperature across probably about meter and a bit gap.
There's a company offering home solutions based on a similar concept, basically you host a server at home which has been designed to attach to your hot water cylinder and give you free hot water, I meant to look at the maths a while back but never got around it it so I've no idea how feasible it it, certainly not for me anyway, don't think they'd appreciate my dire upload speeds lmao.
heata | harnessing heat from cloud compute
We’re building a ground-breaking green compute network, that heats the water in people's homes. Find out more…www.heata.co
Heata Offers UK Residents Free Hot Water in Exchange for Cooling Its Servers
Okay, it's only 4.8kWh/day, and it's only for a year. And also you have to let them install a server in your house. And maybe use your broadband. But...worth it?www.tomshardware.com
It's a nice idea, but realistically I'd bet it would be cheaper to have an optimum cooling solution for an entire data center as opposed to relying on individual servers or racks being used to heat other places.
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Probably cheaper just to run a gas boiler. They’re hard to beat on a domestic level.
comprehensive article
UK data center startup offers to heat Britain's swimming pools with waste heat
Deep Green takes a deep dive starting in Exmouth, Devon
www.datacenterdynamics.com
which seems conistant with power from
ASUS ESC4000A-E10 2U AMD EPYC GPU Server Review
The ASUS ESC4000A-E10 combines a single socket PCIe Gen4 AMD EPYC 7002/ 7003 with 4x double-width or 8x single-width GPUs in a 2U server
www.servethehome.com
would be interesting to see the coolant flow rate.
Why don't these new servers use a different more energy and heat efficient setup? The modern laptops don't have fans in them anymore and they last longer on the battery due to (I'm assuming) cpu architecture. Why don't servers use these low power systems?
Because they are slow compared to their desktop counterparts and would offer less performance per area or computing space.
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Because they're completely different uses
Even if you used laptop CPU's in a server you'd run into cooling issues because your average laptop is not designed to run at full CPU load for long periods of time, a server is.
Servers also pack a lot of performance in a much tighter space, your laptop might get away with passive cooling because it's designed so that a large part of it's surface area is effective a heatsink for it, hence why they'll get warm/hot if you sit them on your lap, a server is trying to pack potentially several high performance CPU's in the same sort of volume..
Basically a server for it's performance can actually be much more efficient per watt of power it uses (and thus heat output), but it's also producing that heat in a much smaller volume of space because for servers the space taken up is more important than passive cooling.
IIRC they've tried all sorts of things to make more efficient servers. to the point where a lot of the really big companies design their own specialised ones for their specific uses to maximise performance*, but they'll still produce a lot of heat as they're not really concerned with reducing the heat output, just improving the performance they get for it.
Even the likes of Nvidia do specialist versions of their GPU's for things like server farms doing pure maths or rendering, let alone as another example all those crypto mining rugs that used processors that were extremely optimized for one crypto coin or another.
*IIRC Facebook, MS, Google etc all design their own custom chips and motherboards for specific jobs if they can't find an off the shelf unit to do the job and they think they'll need enough (the same way all the consoles use customised versions of CPU's and GPU's and remove any "legacy" or unnecessary parts of the chips that might be there by default to allow software to run that you're not going to have on that console).
That's like saying HGV's are too big for a city centre so lets deliver everything to supermarkets with a fleet of Nissan Leafs