Comment by iamnotagenius
5 days ago
The simplest, dumbest alternative to for reversible computing is to install datacenters in ex-USSR, where there is still (slowly disappearing) rich infrastructure for central hot water. Instead of charging people, utilities can charge both people and datacenters and yet lower the carbon footprint.
Energy-aware computing isn't about environmentalism and saving energy. It's sometimes framed as such in the name of greenwashing but it really isn't, the consumption was negligible before the AI/crypto craze. It's about "longer-lasting battery" and "getting more stuff on the chip without melting it".
I believe it would be more efficient to use a heat pump for the district heating even if the datacenter heat is just dumped. Heat pumps can get up to 400% efficiency.
What do you mean by efficient?
The heat emitted by the electronics will always be emitted and needs to go somewhere. If 1MWh of that heat is dumped into district heating how would that be less efficient than the 1MWh being dumped in the atmosphere to (hopefully) be reclaimed by a heat pump elsewhere?
Or, alternatively, that 1MWh could be absorbed by the already existing datacenter AC coils which could ultimately still be used to heat up district water as it cools the refrigerant. (People actually do this with swimming pools, using the coils from their AC to heat the pool).
istjohn is right. Using a heat pump instead of resistive heating (which is basically what a data centre is) is many times more efficient.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't use the heat a data centre provides. It just means that it is not a good idea to neglect the development of energy-saving technology because the heat produced can be used somewhere else.
5 replies →
Resistive heating generates heat: thus, it cannot generate more than 100% of the energy put into the resistor, because of conservation of energy.
In contrast, heat pumps move heat, so they can move more than the energy put into them. Even cold air (around freezing) has a lot of heat in it to siphon off.
If you're going to run 1MWh worth of compute anyway, then selling the waste heat is still a good idea. But if you weren't, a heat pump will get you more heat energy than a bank of computers with the same energy budget.
1 reply →
1. The reality of ex-USSR is that no one will ever convince governments to invest in very costly infrastructure modification for efficiency; datacenters are far far easier to integrate into existing boiler based system.
2. The point was not to replace district heating with datacenters - it is not possible, for variety of reasons, but augment the existing huge gas boilers with the datacenter to collect waste heat to render the datacenter carbon neutral.
3. Even with 400% efficiency, you will still gain if heatmpumps augmented with waste heat, as you would need far less heatpumping. You'd still need your datacenters, won't you?
Wait, you mean there is no central hot water infrastructure in the world? Poland is not ex-USRR but it is common place and I always assumed this is a normal thing everywhere.
Norway, no such thing here (at least not in smaller cities, not sure about Oslo). NTNU campus in Trondheim is warmed by waste heat from supercomputer exactly as GP suggested.
In the US it's pretty much limited to a few university campuses I believe. I think a couple cities in Canada have it, too.
San Francisco has steam heating for part of the city.
[flagged]