alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
This is likely a bit unrealistic, but why can't we make a half rack server to go in someones basement that can also heat up their hot water and use the basement floor as a heat sink as well?
It seems like a lot of the blight of data centers is the energy to remove the heat. By distributing them into cool basements and even connecting them into the home heating system we could reduce that making them more efficient.
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In France, there are at least two companies that are trying (or tried) to commercialize something with a similar idea : domestic radiators that produce heats from embedded computers that are used as cloud infrastucture. - https://www.hestiia.com/en for the end-user market - https://qarnot.com/en that seems to have since pivoted to low-carbon footprint HPC (was mentionned here -- in French -- as doing computer-based heaters : https://www.takagreen.com/solutions/qarnot-radiateur-ordinat... )
Does your house have redundant power connections to the grid and a failover generator?
That said, my plex server for my friends is on an ups and I'm on 1Gb fiber and I have better uptime than AWS.
This has been attempted a few times around the UK, but as other commentators have pointed out physical limitations and lack of environmental controls become issues, and the economics don’t make sense. They make a great story though.
Why don't we all have solar panels on our roof to generate electricity for ourselves?
Why don't we all have small farms on our properties, turning lawns into vegetable producing land for each household?
Why don't we have small datacenters on the property of each business, so the business users and IT folks can keep track of their own servers and data and applications?
Projects like Hestiia and Qarnot tried this in France years ago, using embedded computers as radiators. The idea isn't new, and it consistently runs into the same wall: security, reliability, and operational cost at scale. As others like @8jef mentioned, giving unknown individuals access to infrastructure brings unacceptable risks. Managing a fleet spread across basements means a massive, costly field ops team for servicing. Even with individual ownership, like Storj or Sia, the economic incentives rarely outweigh the risks and operational overhead for the average homeowner.
Nobody wants their home IP blocked because a neighbor's basement rack was compromised, let alone the liability for hardware or data breaches on their property. It just doesn't pencil out.
Many reasons prevent this from being practical for any serious purposes.
1. It depends on what part of the world you are in, but many homes have cooling needs for at least part of the year. The needs to remove excess heat would go up if you are adding more heat -- and it is less efficient to do this at the scale of an individual home than it is at DC scale.
2. Power requirements: While many homelabs have UPS systems -- they lack often lack backup generators, redundant A+B power infrastructure, and don't have the required power density for higher powered servers.
3. Connectivity requirements: most homes don't have access to the connectivity that data centers do.
4. Security requirements: homes simply can't meet the security requirements of most data protection regulations -- things like barriers, access control systems, surveillance, fire protection -- are anywhere from intrusive to completely impossible in a home.
5. Access requirements: homes aren't conducive to a technician responding to an outage at 3am
And those are just the big ones.
Not the same, but there are data centers that feed their excess heat into district heating, e.g. here:
https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revo...
One of the key problems you have to solve is the how do you execute code on an untrusted device. The major cloud providers do a ton of work so you can "trust" the compute you pay for.
Without a truly zero-trust compute platform its going to be difficult to get anyone to trust their workloads to a random compute resource that isn't carefully guarded.
There is a UK company that does this - servers that attach to residential water heaters.
> It seems like a lot of the blight of data centers is the energy to remove the heat.
Not really the only issue actually, the electricity bill would be astronomical for a household and also have you heard the noise from them ?
Issues with them being distributed range from Data protection to Insurance against damage, connectivity issues. Noble maybe, but it's widely unrealistic.
For those who did not know you can get Telekom Deutschland to give you a fixed IP on your fiber or DSL for only a little more than consumer rate if you have a business (but thats easy to just register).
If you ask nicely they give you fiber and vdsl combined with 2 fixed IPs for under 90€ a month. Means you can host everything from bind9 authoritative nameservers at home.
I like my homeservers. Heat. And also if the platters work on my hdds it sounds a bit like rain lol.
We’re currently planning on a datacenter to give its heat to the municipal district heating. That combines your idea to use the heat loss for heating the people’s living space with the needs of a data center like access control, redundancies, interconnections.
Data centre in the shed reduces energy bills to £40
You would have issues with providing the reliability levels (read: SLA) that we come to expect from data centers. But, if there are enough services that we don't care about if they go down for a few hours, this could be doable. It still relies on the assumption that we got enough services to justify the effort though. It is way more realistic if you set up your own homelab and provide services to your family, under the caveat that they may go offline every now and then.
100 computers in 100 homes is way harder to maintain than 100 computers in one place
It might work, but I see the security aspect (physical security) of the data center won't be respected in a normal house basement, unless of it's only intended for personal use, but still the electricity bill might be too high for a house
This makes more sense when the compute is tied to local solar, so excess generation can be turned into useful processing instead of being wasted or exported cheaply. That is closer to the Lektra model.
Where I live this would be nice for about 6 months a year… Can they absorb heat the other 6? …Or, heat the shower water perhaps.
At least one company is working on it. Https://leaf.cloud
You’d have to run a lot of Electron-based apps to go from tepid to hot water.
Lots of people have had this idea since the early days of Bitcoin mining. Some have even done it. I recommend looking up how people have set up mining rigs in their homes.
Your energy cost would be very high paying retail. If you actually want to provide services to the internet from your home, your operating cost is not competitive at all with large scale systems. Who would you sell those services to?
What's unrealistic is the widespread state of IT ignorance among the masses and the kleptocracy that profits from it.
Without this widespread ignorance, and with IPv6, a global per host, and without the disappearance and massive price hikes of RAM and storage, we could all have a home server running, for example, a family's personal services:
- contacts (Radicale/Baïkal/Davis/*)
- photos (Immich, PhotoPrism, ...)
- video (Jellyfin and the like, even Stash for those who fancy it)
- files in general (e.g. SyncThing)
- email (fetched via OfflineIMAP and similar, served via Dovecot+webmail for those who want it, etc.)
- federated XMPP/Matrix for family and friends
- ...
And even for the State, a national blockchain for digital identity (NFTs), contracts (e.g. property sales, etc.), and money, with a node for every family and consensus to regulate it, for maximum resilience and reliability, thus also enabling electronic voting.
But well, given the widespread IT ignorance, it's just a pipe dream.
In this model, we would have de facto teleworking, and therefore de-urbanisation, with houses and sheds with solar panels on the roof, batteries, and activities shifted to maximise self-consumption—thereby electrifying without loading the national grid, in a true and substantial transition that would otherwise be unrealistic.
Personally, that's how my house is, national blockchain aside (but with a personal lightning node anyway), and it works beautifully; it would work brilliantly up to ~45° latitude across the EU and slightly less (I think, I haven't checked the PV maps) for North America. Simply doing this would kill off the aforementioned kleptocrats. No cities means:
- no end to private property for the majority
- no dependence on private collective transport in the hands of a tiny few
- no fast tech/fast fashion with very low costs for the vendor but high costs for the customer and nature due to the piles of waste
- no ready-meal deliveries with tons of packaging
A resilient, renewable society (including the built environment) that can evolve but doesn't have the majority enslaved to a tiny few. This is why it isn't happening.
I guess it'd only work in places where the locals don't use AC. Otherwise it'd be a killer to run in the summer, and so you'd have capital goods rotting in a persons basement half the year.
If the user has AC for the summer, then running the AC in reverse for the winter will provide the homeowner with far more heating per joule than running a computer.
So the issue boils down to, there's not enough people living in places cold enough to make it worthwhile.
Of course, Id argue AI data centers aren't worth it full stop.
Actually reading that Iran attacked AWS and is going to attack other major cloud providers, the massively distributed compute is going to be the only solution that will be resilient enough for the current civilization to survive attacks on the infrastructure.
We'll be certainly less performant and less capable, but the data will continue to flow and business processes will proceed. If cloud data centers are destroyed, everything that's important to sustain us stops and we die.
A half rack weighs probably 1000 pounds. Good luck getting that into someone's basement.
why not district heating at that point? less headaches with distributing hardware to a bunch of homes
With residential PG&E levels of reliability, nope. And no I don't want a 100 kWh lithium battery in my house.
I think this is exactly the future for non-giant-corpo internet
The problem is DNS and access to the IP network
So if you can figure out how to build reliable DNS access/approvals with cloudflare etc then it would work
The biggest challenge at the largest scale is political because then you’re gonna be fighting all of the ISP’s and the giant technology companies and ultimately they’re never going to allow for this
Either take it over on their own by offering their own service which people would sign up for
or they’ll just pressure every ISP or certificate authority to not recognize routes that are not going through “allowed” data centers,
most likely you would end up with a series of state bills or even a federal regulation that prevents data routing for public consumption unless it in some kind of “security standard” or whatever bullshit they come up with
It can work in actually developed countries such as South Korea that have effectively 100% fiber coverage.
In crony capitalism countries (US) or countries that have been governed by braindead "Das Internet ist Neuland" conservatives (Germany) and as such have less than 25% FTTB coverage, you can't run a data center.
That's a great idea. I see at least 2 difficulties emerging: first security, then servicing.
No private or public entity will grant access to valuable proprietary hardware, as unacceptable risks will not only come from building owners, but also from anyone entering premises.
Also, managing remote nodes evenly spreaded across all areas will be costly. Think of armies of techs on the road permanently, with access problem, dogs or pest barriers, and so on.
A way to solve this would be the allocation of a planned space per block everywhere, which would be safely secured - then available and accessible to all utility organizations: electric, isp, water, phone, data, etc. Heat, power, mini data centers, and such could serve all buildings on a block.
Then other problems emerges: having utilities plan and use these together. Would only work if all services belong to the same entity.
A way around, of course, would be for individuals to setup servers they would own, and rent to data brokers, like Holo project once planned for.