HEATA

British firm offers free hot water by putting servers in water tanks

Heata has developed a new way to use the waste heat generated by servers by mounting them in domestic hot water tanks to reduce homeowners' energy bills.

The company, whose services now include cloud computing, 3D rendering and ways to help homeowners improve the efficiency of their real estate inventory, teamed up with cloud provider Civo to offer computing resources to run some workloads. Heata started as a project within the energy company British Gas to help customers living in poverty, something many can empathize with now. It has now been developed with investment from British Gas, Innovate UK, as well as Civo, a cloud services provider that focuses exclusively on workloads running with Kubernetes.

The initial concept developed by the company involved using heat generated by Bitcoin mining equipment, according to Heat co-founder and CTO Chris Jordan. “We literally put a bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and ran it through a radiator,” he said. British Gas liked the idea of making money out of computing, he said, and the team switched to a new approach that didn't require plumbing, which was to connect the server to the outside of a hot water cylinder to heat the water. Here, the project is already in the pilot phase and includes around one hundred units in individual residences in the next three to six months.

The company will allow customers to run compute nodes and receive feedback on performance and reliability, as well as indicators of how hardware hosts are saving on their energy bills and CO2 emissions. For testing, anyone wanting to host one of the units will need to have an Internet connection that the server can use to connect to Heat, but the company said it is in talks with several cable broadband providers to provide connectivity to host homes. . The hardware itself consists of a box that houses an ATX motherboard, with a large metal plate connected to the domestic hot water tank using thermal epoxy. The board plugs directly into the cooler for the CPUs, which are refurbished Xeon processors with a total of 56 cores under test, Jordan said.

“Essentially, what we're aiming for is to match the CPU power with about 80% of the hot water consumption of a family of four, that's the sweet spot,” he added.

Installation can be done by a heating engineer or an electrician, because the unit is simply a “black box” that just needs to be assembled and connected to electricity and the grid, says Heata. The important thing is that the unit provides additional energy for heating water, so that the resident is not left without hot water in the event of a failure and does not have to work with the device. The company claims that each unit could save a ton of carbon per year. Computing-wise, Heata is careful about the type of work it deploys compute nodes for, as it effectively has multiple individual servers that can be distributed across the country. The partnership with Civo will also see Heat units available as an option for Civo customers as edge nodes to run workloads. Civo's focus on Kubernetes means workloads can be deployed and managed using Suse Rancher as an orchestration platform. Civo CEO Mark Boost said his company is currently developing a function as a service (Faas) or so-called serverless computing offering that "would fit really well with something like Heata."

“At a time of rising energy prices, I am particularly committed to being a bridge between the world of technology and areas such as social housing, where the need for solutions to the growing cost of living crisis is most felt,” said Jordan.

Last year, a Korean company called Tomorrow Water aimed to co-locate data centers with wastewater treatment plants so that heated water from the data center could be used for increased wastewater treatment, with some of the treated water returned to the data center. center for cooling purposes.

Most bizarre of all, however, was a data center in Hokkaido, Japan, that used snow to cool its IT infrastructure and then used the resulting meltwater, heated to 33°C, to grow eels for human consumption.

by: mundophone