Servers And Server Rooms interesting options

[zenia 0]

Recently the option was discussed to put servers in households. The air, that is used to cool the server, can be used to warm the house.This discussion makes the way the server centers are built interesting.When a person looks at a picture of servers it is visible, that the servers are built from a distance from eachother.One reason for the paths between the server racks can be the need to be able to control the server. For that reason it has to be possible that a human being can walk between the servers.Another reason to keep an open space between servers is the option to transport the servers. When a server breaks down it can be necessary to replace the server by another machine.And when the servers get updated it has to be possible to take the old servers away and to bring the new servers to the place of the old servers.Another reason why there is a lot of space between servers can be the necessity to cool the servers. A lot of free air flying around the servers make it possible to cool the servers with air.When these options are considered it can be interesting to think about the different reasons why server rooms are built the way they are designed. The demands servers ask in order to be able to work smoothly have to be taken in account when server stations are constructed.

Edited August 28, 2011 by zenia (see edit history)

[8ennett 0]

Well it's an age-old thing this, using excess forms of energy for use in other places (at least I think that was what your initial statement was regarding). Use the excess heat off one thing to warm up another thing, and use the excess coldness of something to cool down other things.A practical example of this was back in the early years of the Roman Empire. They would place their kitchens (well more so their ovens to be accurate) in the basements of their buildings and have slaves cook their food over roaring fires, however these fires would also be used in unison with vents that ran beneath the floors of the upper building to produce underfloor heating. As time progressed the Romans adopted the attitude of many of us today and built the fires purely to provide heating for the buildings and cooked their food in seperate ovens, but that is where the original concept came from, using cooking fires to also heat homes (very industrious of them).Placing servers in homes to heat them however is somewhat of a wild idea, for one there is nowhere near enough servers in the world to heat the homes of everyone, not nearly enough, so only a select few would have them, plus the inconvenience of having technicians on hand to tend to the servers and so on would make your house rather crowded. Also you need to consider the fact that servers need to be cooled rapidly. The reason servers need to be cooled is to prevent overheating which would cause serious damage to the components that make up a server. Electricity travels faster through heat than cold (as you will notice if you flash freeze a power line) so cooling servers can only be taken to a certain level. But like the Roman central heating system, the heat source needs to be kept hot in order to produce enough heat to actually create a noticeable difference in ambient temperature to where the heat is being directed. Heat is not channelled from servers to elsewhere, the servers need to be kept in a low temperature environment which reduces the amount of heat they produce. If the heat were to be channelled then that would defeat the purpose of cooling them at all as they would still be producing heat. Instead the servers are kept in a cool environment where the server is cooled at the same temperature it is heating up, preventing over heating. Because of this method of cooling there is no excess heat to channel therefore there is no practical means to use a server as a heat source. The only way you could use a server to produce heat would be at the expense of the servers lifespan which would inevitably be short considering the amount of heat required to warm up a household.On a smaller scale you could consider your PC. The processor in your computer produces a large amount of heat when running, however you do not feel the heat from your pc as the cooling fan inside it transfers cool air from around your tower to the copper blocks on top of your processor, which in turn channel the cold air to your processor in the form of cool metal. This prevents your processor from overheating, but at the same time you can be sat next to your computer all day and not feel any additional heat from it because of this cooling system.It's interesting how you have pointed out the layout of a server room and the practical reasons for spacing out each server, however the initial statement of using servers to warm a household is factually incorrect and not a viable means of producing heat at all. Perhaps some form of heat exchange system may be plausible in the future, but for now rapid cooling of a server in a temperature controlled environment is the only means to prevent overheating and permanent damage within servers, at least from a cost-effective view anyhow. Any other working method would cost more than it would to just heat a home through gas or oil fuelled boilers utilising hot water through radiators.

[zenia 0]

Thank you for the thoughts about this topic.

The research is done by Microsoft. The research resulted in a report. The report states:

AbstractIn this paper, we argue that servers can be sent to homes
and ofce buildings and used as a primary heat source.
We call this approach the Data Furnace or DF. Data Furances have three advantages over traditional data centers: 1) a smaller carbon footprint 2) reduced total cost
of ownership per server 3) closer proximity to the users.
From the home ownerâs perspective, a DF is equivalent
to a typical heating system: a metal cabinet is shipped to
the home and added to the ductwork or hot water pipes.
From a technical perspective, DFs create new opportunities for both lower cost and improved quality of service,
if cloud computing applications can exploit the differences in the cost structure and resource prole between
Data Furances and conventional data centers.

The conclusion of the research is:

5 ConclusionWith continuously increasing demand for computing, the
community must explore novel ways to expand computing capacity without increasing nancial burden and energy costs. Data Furances will reuse the facilities and
energy already allocated for heating purposes to provide
computing services with low cost and energy footprint.
In this paper, we focus on homes as an illustrating example, but a similar approach could be used to heat water
tanks, ofce buildings, apartment complexes, vegetable
farms, and large campuses with central facilities.

The research report can be found here:

Heat research report

The idea to warm a house with the warmth produced by a server opened some insight about the need to control the temperature inside a room with servers.

The main topic of the start post is the way data centers are built. The demands of the need to cool the servers influences the way the rooms are designed and the way the servers are placed in the rooms. It seems that the servers can't just be packed inside a room. The cooling demands, the demands to be able to reach the servers and transportation options mean that a room with servers needs to be bigger than the actual size of the servers.
Edited August 29, 2011 by zenia (see edit history)

[zenia 0]

The name of the research and the research paper with the results of the research is:The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud ComputingThe research is done by researchers of Microsoft together with scientists of the University of Virginia.The names of the researchers are:Jie Liu, Michel Goraczko, Sean James, Christian BeladyMicrosoft ResearchOne Microsoft WayRedmond, WA 98052Jiakang Lu, Kamin WhitehouseComputer Science DepartmentUniversity of VirginiaCharlottesville, VA 22904The interesting part of these names is that the University of Virginia participates in this research. The cooperation of one of the biggest computer programs firms in the world and an American university gives the impression that this topic is looked upon in a serious way.The reaction of 8ennett shows that a lot of difficulties need to be solved before this option can actually work.

Edited August 29, 2011 by zenia (see edit history)

[8ennett 0]

Yeah sorry about that, I'd had quite a few drinks last night and tend to get a little passionate when in that state lolInteresting report, I suppose the fact it was considered at all says a lot.

[yordan 10]

Maybe we can find an intermediate solution.The standard cooling systems have a cold source and a hot source.And the problem of computing centers is to evacuate the heat from the hot source.Usually this hot source is in the top of the building, with a lot of fans to refresh it.We could imagine an exchange system, with a fluid taking the calories from the hot source and bringing them to your home.This will be very interesting during winter.But during the summer, will you need more heat in your home?