Turn On the Server. It’s Cold Inside.
29th November 2011
TO satisfy our ever-growing need for computing power, many technology companies have moved their work to data centers with tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat. The additional power needed for cooling them — up to half of the power used to run them — is the steep environmental price we have paid to move data to the so-called cloud.
Well, of you left-wing assholes would allow us to build nuclear power plants, it wouldn’t be a problem. Nuclear power plants have no environmental price except in the fever dreams of Jane Fonda and her crowd.
Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”
I am not making this up.
November 30th, 2011 at 11:00
“Nuclear power plants have no environmental price except in the fever dreams of Jane Fonda and her crowd.”
Or until something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong.
Just ask the farmers of Fukushima.