Data centres to heat-up homes

BANGALORE, INDIA: At a time when electricity consumed by computers and other IT equipment has been skyrocketing in recent years, and has become a substantial part of the global energy market, a new research finds that servers can be used as a primary heat source for homes and office buildings.

The researchers argue that computers can be placed directly into buildings to provide low latency cloud computing for its offices or residents, and the heat that is generated can be used to heat the building.

Also Read: Data centre temp envelope grows but no equipment

Four researchers at the Microsoft and two at the University of Virginia find that this approach, called Data Furnace or DF, have three advantages over traditional data centres:

1) a smaller carbon footprint

2) reduced total cost of ownership per server

3) closer proximity to the users.

Moreover, DFs reduce the total cost of conventional data centres in three main ways.

First, much of the initial capital investment to build the infrastructure for a data centre is

avoided, adds the research.

A second and related benefit is that operating costs are reduced. And, finally, the money to buy and operate a furnace for home heating is avoided.

A lower-cost DF can also operate year-round using the broadband channel of the home instead of upgrading the network link, thereby supporting typical computation

loads but with a relatively slow regress link.

Network latency can be reduced by creating more data centres closer to customers,  particularly for cloud applications such as E-mail, multimedia distribution, and low-hit rate web pages and services that are delay tolerant, embarrassingly distributable, and/or can benefit from large-scale replication and geo-distribution, adds the paper.