BRILLIANT! Mine with your heater/heat with your Miner
Computing that works double-time
Did y'all hear about this one? French company Qarnot announced last week that they plan to use 1500 AMD Ryzen PRO CPUs to heat homes in France. The concept blew my mind-- a distributed cloud platform whose heat production and electricity costs aren't externalities?! GENIUS!
The concept is simple: rather than cramming all your fancy CPUs into a datacenter that requires exorbitant amounts of energy to power (including the high cost of keeping all these CPUs cool), flip the model on its head and put the hot CPUs where the heat will be welcome-- into peoples' homes. Then, use the profit from your cloud platform to reimburse home users for their energy costs, and viola! No more costly physical datacenter sapping funds from your profitable cloud system!
And suddenly one need not stress over the smallest, coolest, most energy-efficient processor-- the hotter and faster, the better!
Currently, Qarnot uses their Q.RAD compute-heaters mainly for high-end 3D/VFX rendering and financial risk analysis, but I'm sure you steemians can think of other uses for such a system. Think about it-- I'm not sure how many clients Qarnot has and what kind of uptime they require, but if you think about it, all your Q.RADs running at max capacity to keep away the coldest winter nights surely results in at least a little excess compute power... and why not mine for cryptocurrency with that power!
Sure, steam is great because we earn crypto for our creativity, and don't have to worry about investing in a crypto miner and all the costs that come with it. But what if your heater was your miner-- then cranking the heat wouldn't hurt the wallet, it would fill it!
What do you think about Qarnot's model?
What other systems could we convert from hot, costly moneypits into distributed compute networks? Maybe energy generation itself (think steam power, heated by crypto miners!)?
Read more about Qarnot's Q.RADs on macobserver and techrepublic; original story from slashdot
ahh! there's more! a wind turbine that powers a miner which contributes to climate change research-- the wackier the climate gets, the more power goes to mining for a solution!
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