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AssOfficer t1_jc66sxd wrote

If a "washing machine sized data center" can heat a pool to 30°C then holy hell what are we doing with actual data centers????

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AltharaD t1_jc6ahbt wrote

Air conditioners. Lot of money is spent cooling them.

https://dataspan.com/blog/data-center-cooling-costs/

According to that link 1% of the world’s electricity goes on cooling data centres. That’s an enormous amount.

If we can use the heat generated by data centres more effectively (and consequently reduce cooling costs) then that could be a massive win.

Edit: this link shows how a larger data centre can provide hot water to over 10% of Denmark’s third largest city.

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internetcommunist t1_jc6ko68 wrote

That’s insane. Makes me feel way less bad about my desktop tower lmao

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danielv123 t1_jc78np9 wrote

Rack power density has been balooning the last few years. Typical power consumption was ~5kw per 42u rack for like a decade. Now we are nearing 20kw average. Compute oriented systems for AI workloads and whatnot pack 60kw+ per rack. A lot of older datacenters have to run half full racks because their central cooling system can't deal with the heat of full ones anymore.

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hung_like__podrick t1_jc7fdhb wrote

We’re going to be reaching the limit of what traditional cooling methods like CRAC units are capable of with those densities. I hope to see more liquid cooling applications or other solutions like rear doors that aren’t as prevalent as traditional CRACs.

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RuKiddin06 t1_jc8nwa3 wrote

I used to for for a company that uses self enclosed cabinets to avoid the use of floor AC units and isolate intense workloads. Scalematrix / DDC. Super interesting compared to raised floor. From what I can tell it's still kinda expensive, but the idea is promising.

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hung_like__podrick t1_jc8p3q6 wrote

Oh nice. I’m familiar with Scalematrix. Raised floors aren’t as prevalent as they used to be and honestly it’s for the better.

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RuKiddin06 t1_jc8pgi4 wrote

Oh cool! Yeah, having now worked in a switch facility for another company, as well as raised floor sites, concrete slab, and cooling similar to these is the way forward.

Liquid door also comes to mind.

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CharacterOtherwise77 t1_jc713r0 wrote

It's not a massive win, it's just some efficiency while combusting millions of tons in the process anyway.

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lovejac93 t1_jc76bvp wrote

If you utilized the heat from all data centers to provide heat elsewhere, you’d reduce the amount spent to heat those places.

It’s still a massive win

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CharacterOtherwise77 t1_jc7cnz8 wrote

That sounds like an enormous waste of resources. We don't have an efficient way to transport heat, it travels through matter.

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Lumi5 t1_jc7dtub wrote

In Finland we do have a pretty efficient way of transporting heat. It's called district heating and plenty of houses in larger towns are getting their heating through that. Basically it's very well insulated water pipes going around the city. Actually 46 percent of residential and service buildings in Finland are heated by that.

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CharacterOtherwise77 t1_jc7f8w1 wrote

But you also get brutal winters, so it was out of necessity not just efficiency. NOT having heat could be deadly there

With server farms they create heat, it's the opposite problem that exacerbates itself. Then they use more power to cool them which creates more heat, more refuse.

Should we dig up all the concrete roads and run pipes across buildings? That will never happen.

We should be making servers that run cooler by making the chips a certain size, and by creating chips which are more specialized rather than having 16 core computers that can do everything.

The same server that runs google can run Doom, that makes no sense to me.

Also I love Finland and bless you all.

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Lumi5 t1_jc7h98e wrote

Converting current infrastructure to accommodate that might not be very feasible. But planning future projects with this in mind is completely reasonable. We already have a data center in Helsinki that's providing heating for up to 20 000 apartments.

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Whaines t1_jc7jq4u wrote

Well if the data center is in use it’s not wasted. It would be more wasteful to use more energy on AC to cool it down than to use that generated heat for something useful.

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abark006 t1_jc6tdhg wrote

It can’t. That’s a major exaggeration. Maybe if it’s indoors well insulated and you leave it on for a long ass time.

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danielv123 t1_jc79iwb wrote

A washing machine is about 39" according to google. Nvidias DGX H100 systems use 11kw and are 14" tall. That is definitely in the ballpark of the pool heaters I find on google for pools of size 40 - 120m3.

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Tanedra t1_jc7czxg wrote

I note that it's not just a basic data store, they're using it for AI and machine learning - these are extremely intensive activities and it's very plausible for that to generate a ton of heat.

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Great68 t1_jc7u5d2 wrote

Yeah I'm a bit skeptical as well, maybe I just need more details. The last pool mechanical system I worked on was sized for ~300kW of heat for a simple 6 lane, 25m pool.

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Odd_so_Star_so_Odd t1_jc7pcwe wrote

Parts of the world seeks to push them towards heating homes instead of wasting the heat/burn more energy to cool the servers. It's an uphill battle though as these big tech companies prefer a race to the bottom where they rather pay to greenwash themselves than make an actual difference. As I understand it this is a developing field to optimize and increase energy efficiency of big data centers. They can often offset their carbon footprint by providing heating to the towns they're built in, if only they're willing and it don't cost them too much...

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who_you_are t1_jc8jldo wrote

Knowing them they will charge us for the heat they produce... Even if we are the one to pay for the infrastructure...

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kelvin_bot t1_jc66tgh wrote

30°C is equivalent to 86°F, which is 303K.

^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)

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alexlarrylawrence t1_jc8ij1y wrote

I work in manufacturing and just competed a quote for valves to run cooling water for one data center. The quote was over 2.5 million dollars.

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itchyfrog t1_jc60xip wrote

Finally a bit of joined up thinking.

Now can we use this on a bigger scale for district heating?

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7h33v1l7w1n t1_jc6l61k wrote

If you pay attention to the kinds of master planning projects that municipalities, universities, and commercial entities are initiating, there are certainly projects similar to this in the works, among many other creative solutions for efficient district heating, power, etc.

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vasya349 t1_jc67zrp wrote

I don’t think the data centers large enough to be useful are the best use of space in areas dense enough for district heat.

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itchyfrog t1_jc694pa wrote

This one is the size of a washing machine and can heat a municipal swimming pool 60% of the time, it currently costs around £300k a year to heat a pool in the UK, which is around what 300 houses worth of central heating costs.

Even after allowing for an order of magnitude difference in efficiencies between heating a body of water and homes you wouldn't be looking at huge amounts of space.

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RU_FKM t1_jc6tne6 wrote

I'm in Canada and our pool costs about $2000 per year (May through September) to heat. (18x30 feet)

How big is the pool that costs 150 times that?! (Not even considering exchange rate.)

Edit: it's an outdoor pool.

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itchyfrog t1_jc72di6 wrote

A fairly standard municipal pool will be about 25mx10m by an average of about 2m deep

So about 82ft x 32ft x 6.5ft and the electric will probably be between £0.50-£1 a kwh depending on their contract, and it's all year round, and the article said the £300k was to heat the complex so presumably includes changing rooms and offices etc but the pool will be most of it.

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Gynetic t1_jc6op2e wrote

Rotterdam (The Netherlands), has already been using a similar method of providing heating to a huge portion of the city since 2006. 'Stadsverwarming' (directly translated to city-heating), uses excess heat that's produced in the city's port/harbour to provide heating to houses and businesses all over the city.

(It's also the largest port in the world outside of Asia)

There are other parts of The Netherlands which already use the excess heat from large scale data centers for exactly the same thing. Cities such as Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Groningen for example.

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lt_spaghetti t1_jc7thql wrote

Here in Quebec city a large datacenter opening up will heat a hothouse full of weed, tomatoes and strawberries.

Not bad

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Papegaaiduiker t1_jc6p194 wrote

I'm living in a city thats very soon getting this. It's not all great, as some/a lot of the houses are older and not designed for low heating. So they get moisture problems and are too cold. But it's still pretty nice.

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je97 OP t1_jc5lilx wrote

The BBc headline writers once again seem to have charged by the letter, however, the most important things to point out are that the data centre is able to fulfill the swimming pools heating needs 60 % of the time without assistance and this has the ability to save the swimming pool thousands.

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Thuzacria t1_jc6ad85 wrote

Don't let Linus see this.

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IBJON t1_jc7342a wrote

Didn't he already do this?

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Marathon2021 t1_jc86hd9 wrote

People have been experimenting with these concepts for decades. I remember one of our CTOs at Sun Microsystems (yeah, remember them?) talking about it and citing some random obscure example where it was done.

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Carighan t1_jc6sozt wrote

He makes stupid enough faces without these news, yeah.

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tacomacs t1_jc6eqap wrote

This is an excellent idea

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Noobmoob t1_jc6qkw2 wrote

I wonder if they got the idea from Linus Tech Tips?

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omniplatypus t1_jc6rra6 wrote

This idea has been around in the HVAC world for a while

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danielv123 t1_jc7a4qj wrote

Yep. My city has a central heat system. Among other things, cooling for the ice rink is used to heat the swimming hall and sidewalks downtown.

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Tamariniak t1_jc6wg37 wrote

Linus Sebastian tweaking rn

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Sundaver t1_jc86jo9 wrote

Lol people underestimate how hot metal gets when electricity goes through it

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xmichael86 t1_jc8kiuz wrote

This must be the Reddit servers

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