Heating your home with data - cloud computers as residential boilers?
A team of researchers at Microsoft and the University of Virginia have proposed that remote computing servers could used to heat people’s homes.
According to the team:
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. This approach improves quality of service by moving storage and computation closer to the consumer, and simultaneously improves energy efficiency and reduces costs by reusing the electricity and electrical infrastructure thatwould normally be used for space heating alone.
Betabeat also proposes:
What if big tech companies installed their data centers as the heating units for American schools or affordable public housing? The government could cut them some tax breaks as an initial incentive, then reap the long term rewards as Facebook’s data consumption.
This be the win-win solution for greener server farms, but until we have ubiquitous high-speed internet across the land it’ll be a dream far, far away.
(Source: betabeat.com)
