Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers
- Reference: 1678816810
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/03/14/cloud_startup_waste_heat_dcs/
- Source link:
[1]
Literally an IT solution ... Deep Green's server gear in cooling fluid
But don't expect you can use the scheme to get your home electric bill down: it confirmed to us it is "business only."
Deep Green is claiming a British first for its setup, which provides heat to businesses and public swimming pools, reducing their energy bills. It involves a mini datacenter deployment with the IT equipment immersed in a liquid cooling fluid (described as a mineral oil by Deep Green) with a heat exchanger to transfer the heat energy on to where it is needed.
The technology has already been deployed at Exmouth Leisure Centre in south west England, where the waste heat from a dozen servers is being used to warm the swimming pool. This is expected to reduce the pool's energy requirements by 62 percent, saving them over £20,000 ($24,334) a year and also reducing their carbon dioxide emissions, we're told.
This deployment will be followed by further installations in Bristol and Manchester in the near future, according to Deep Green. The company installs the kit for free, and also covers the electricity and maintenance costs of the infrastructure.
[2]
Similar projects using waste heat from datacenters are already bin use at various locations, but on a much larger scale, recycling the heat from an entire datacenter to be used by a local community. Such a scheme was announced by [3]Microsoft in Finland last year, and by [4]Netherlands datacenter company Bytesnet .
[5]
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Deep Green is instead proposing much smaller installations that can be deployed into individual businesses or sites. "By moving datacenters from industrial warehouses into the hearts of communities, our 'digital boilers' put waste heat to good use, saving local businesses thousands of pounds on energy bills and reducing their carbon footprint," claimed chief executive Mark Bjornsgaard.
He added that swimming pools are just the start, and estimated about 30 percent of all industrial and commercial heating requirements could be met by this technology.
[7]Japan successfully propels steam-powered spacecraft
[8]Off the grid, Day 10: Yandex's only datacenter outside of Russia still running on diesel
[9]Heata offers free hot water by mounting servers on people's water tanks
[10]QTS refits Dutch datacenter to warm thousands of homes with waste heat
We asked what Deep Green gets out of the deal, and the company told us it costs less for them to install and operate an edge datacenter at a business site than it would otherwise cost to operate the same servers at a commercial colocation facility or run its own datacenter infrastructure. It also removes the need for huge energy-consuming air conditioning units, the company said.
When we asked what options customers have on the heating side, Deep Green said its tech could be used with a plate heat exchanger to provide water heating or "in combination with other heating systems (air handling, heat pumps etc) as part of a portfolio solution to meet other heat requirements."
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In addition, The Reg also asked about which customers purchase its compute services and which servers it is using.
A Deep Green spokesperson told us the servers are "AMD EPYC single CPU servers configured with 4x A100 80Gb PCIe GPUs and 4TB of SSD storage on open chassis to ensure the most efficient heat transfer."
They added: "We are renting them for use in AI training and machine learning workloads currently – however [we] also can offer [for example] cloud services and video rendering."
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Deep Green's master plan ... Click to enlarge
On the customer-facing side, Deep Green is [13]punting cloud services powered by Dell servers with Nvidia GPUs, including HPC clusters for machine learning or AI applications. ®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/03/14/deepgreen-image002.jpg
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZBD8kc6dACbAZ7ffUftafgAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/17/microsoft_datacenter_finland/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/boston_bytesnet_datacenter_heat/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZBD8kc6dACbAZ7ffUftafgAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZBD8kc6dACbAZ7ffUftafgAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/28/asia_tech_news_brief/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/yandex_datacenter_in_finland/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/12/heata_offers_free_hot_water/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/datacenter_district_heating/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZBD8kc6dACbAZ7ffUftafgAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/03/14/deepgreen2.jpg
[13] https://deepgreen.energy/
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: DC or DC?
If it ain't direct current or district of columbia, it's not DC!
Re: DC or DC?
You could probably run a DNS server on a potato.
and it wouldn't be a hot potato, oh no.
Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing
But how is this going to work in the heat of summer, when the outside air temperature is 35°C and the swimming pool doesn't need heating? Where does the waste heat go then?
Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing
35° is not that common for the UK, and water takes a very long time to get heated. Even in the summer, there is usually some energy spent on heating water. The situation you describe will happen at some point, but it's not going to be every year. If they try to expand these into countries that experience real heat, they'll encounter it a lot more often, which might explain why northern Europe hosts all the examples mentioned in the article.
Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing
Hot tub (time machine)?
Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing
Even if the system only works part of the year it seems as if energy usage will be reduced. Not sure what your point was.
At least one crematorium has used a similar system for about a decade
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-23104502.amp
Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing
That's why a swimming pool is the best - and possibly only - place for this.
Water has a really high heat capacity, and swimmers like warm water - 24-30C. Evaporation from the surface cools the pool, so warmer air temp isn't as much help as you might think.
A pool needs something like 1kW per m3.
So a pool the size of Sunak's is about 600kW of heating demand. Maybe half that on a hot day.
When the processing output is low, the "traditional" heating system takes the full load. When it is high, the traditional heating is turned down a bit.
Billing is probably the main reason for business-use-only. You definitely want the servers on their own metered supply.
Though I would be a little concerned about lifetime of the kit. Chlorinated water is exceedingly corrosive, separation needs to be perfect.
Great in winter ...
but would you still want all that heat in a Summer heat wave ?
Re: Great in winter ...
Presumably we'll have to fill the other six swimming pools with loads of phase-change heat storage, so we can cope with the summer excess heat and hold onto it until winter.
All we need to do is work out exactly how big they need to be. My money is on "pretty fucking big," unless there's some super-duper phase-change materials coming down the line with a massive heat of fusion and room temperature melting point.
Re: Great in winter ...
Water is a seriously effective heat storage medium.
The main reason for the specialist phase-change stuff is that heat of fusion can be extracted without a change in temperature, and water inconsiderately changes phase at 273K, instead of a more useful 300 or 330K.
This sort of reminds me of something my father literally won an award for and was asked to give a presentation on. While working at a meat processing plant in a climate that gets rather nipply in the winter, he suggested that instead of spending huge amounts of money on ammonia to cool a room, they just open the door in the ceiling and let the cold air from outside come wafting in. One of those ideas that no one thinks of for years, but seems so blindingly obvious once it's pointed out. It wouldn't work in every location, but it apparently ended up saving the company, with similar plants all over the country, quite a bit of money every year.
heat a pool you say
if only Rish! was a real tech bro.. could have saved on his paddling pool.
Get others involved in the initiative
Maybe Elon musk could talk into a funnel to generate enough hot air to turn the pool into a hot tub ?
Re: Get others involved in the initiative
I believe we no longer boil people to death as a form of execution.
MS ahead of the curve with on-prem Azure servers?
So there are benefits to on-prem, just need to get those heat exchangers correctly set up.
Nothing new
Not exactly a new idea.
From 2015:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-32739497
"The server that could heat your home at no cost
A radiator fitted with a computer server could help provide free heating for homes.
The heat generated by servers has been exploited on an industrial scale to warm buildings, but this is the first time somebody else's server has been used to heat a home.
'The eRadiators are not being used for permanent storage,' said Boaz Leupe the CEO of Nerdalize, 'They are really meant for firms, or universities, or research institutes that have a need for computation power.'
Mr Leupe said the amount of electricity the Eneco eRadiators used was monitored and the home owners reimbursed for the running costs."
Re: Nothing new
Click 99% of articles in the Reg and guess what. No new ideas.
DC or DC?
DataCenter or DomainController? Glad the column says it's a DataCenter... Not sure how much heat a DC would generate, my experience says your desktop running Doom will generate more heat than a DC handing out addresses and resolving a few names.