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AltharaD t1_jc6ahbt wrote

Reply to comment by AssOfficer in Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool by je97

Air conditioners. Lot of money is spent cooling them.

https://dataspan.com/blog/data-center-cooling-costs/

According to that link 1% of the world’s electricity goes on cooling data centres. That’s an enormous amount.

If we can use the heat generated by data centres more effectively (and consequently reduce cooling costs) then that could be a massive win.

Edit: this link shows how a larger data centre can provide hot water to over 10% of Denmark’s third largest city.

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internetcommunist t1_jc6ko68 wrote

That’s insane. Makes me feel way less bad about my desktop tower lmao

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danielv123 t1_jc78np9 wrote

Rack power density has been balooning the last few years. Typical power consumption was ~5kw per 42u rack for like a decade. Now we are nearing 20kw average. Compute oriented systems for AI workloads and whatnot pack 60kw+ per rack. A lot of older datacenters have to run half full racks because their central cooling system can't deal with the heat of full ones anymore.

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hung_like__podrick t1_jc7fdhb wrote

We’re going to be reaching the limit of what traditional cooling methods like CRAC units are capable of with those densities. I hope to see more liquid cooling applications or other solutions like rear doors that aren’t as prevalent as traditional CRACs.

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RuKiddin06 t1_jc8nwa3 wrote

I used to for for a company that uses self enclosed cabinets to avoid the use of floor AC units and isolate intense workloads. Scalematrix / DDC. Super interesting compared to raised floor. From what I can tell it's still kinda expensive, but the idea is promising.

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hung_like__podrick t1_jc8p3q6 wrote

Oh nice. I’m familiar with Scalematrix. Raised floors aren’t as prevalent as they used to be and honestly it’s for the better.

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RuKiddin06 t1_jc8pgi4 wrote

Oh cool! Yeah, having now worked in a switch facility for another company, as well as raised floor sites, concrete slab, and cooling similar to these is the way forward.

Liquid door also comes to mind.

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CharacterOtherwise77 t1_jc713r0 wrote

It's not a massive win, it's just some efficiency while combusting millions of tons in the process anyway.

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lovejac93 t1_jc76bvp wrote

If you utilized the heat from all data centers to provide heat elsewhere, you’d reduce the amount spent to heat those places.

It’s still a massive win

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CharacterOtherwise77 t1_jc7cnz8 wrote

That sounds like an enormous waste of resources. We don't have an efficient way to transport heat, it travels through matter.

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Lumi5 t1_jc7dtub wrote

In Finland we do have a pretty efficient way of transporting heat. It's called district heating and plenty of houses in larger towns are getting their heating through that. Basically it's very well insulated water pipes going around the city. Actually 46 percent of residential and service buildings in Finland are heated by that.

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CharacterOtherwise77 t1_jc7f8w1 wrote

But you also get brutal winters, so it was out of necessity not just efficiency. NOT having heat could be deadly there

With server farms they create heat, it's the opposite problem that exacerbates itself. Then they use more power to cool them which creates more heat, more refuse.

Should we dig up all the concrete roads and run pipes across buildings? That will never happen.

We should be making servers that run cooler by making the chips a certain size, and by creating chips which are more specialized rather than having 16 core computers that can do everything.

The same server that runs google can run Doom, that makes no sense to me.

Also I love Finland and bless you all.

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Lumi5 t1_jc7h98e wrote

Converting current infrastructure to accommodate that might not be very feasible. But planning future projects with this in mind is completely reasonable. We already have a data center in Helsinki that's providing heating for up to 20 000 apartments.

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Whaines t1_jc7jq4u wrote

Well if the data center is in use it’s not wasted. It would be more wasteful to use more energy on AC to cool it down than to use that generated heat for something useful.

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