[clug] Re CO2 footprint of Searches: Storm in A Tea Cup or Deep Green Issue?

[Andrew Janke]

> Other projects include. Putting the server beside a powerstation so the
> waste heat from the powerstation can drive the coolers directly. Russia,
> Greenland and Nunavut are building passive cooled systems in the high
> arctic.
> Putting the server farm in a swimming pool complex has also worked in
> Europe. There the computers heat the pool, the Pool is cooled passively
> by high evaporation in summer.

When I was working in Montreal a few years back there was an even
simpler system to keep our 128CPU Onyx + Origin 3800 system cool in
winter... remove the double paned glass on the windows of the server
room and put Aussie-style single pane glass in. Reduced A/C costs by
about 80% in winter. (-25deg C outside!). :)

Mind you the next year we replaced the entire 16 racks of the thing
with 8x 4U of Dual Quad Xeon Debian no-name machines and got better
performance for about 1/100th of the power draw....  On this note I am
very interested to see how my new little stack of core i7s that I am
about to add to a cluster here stack up in terms of heat/energy vs
number crunching power.

Still I like the idea of heating the pool.



--
Andrew Janke
(a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
Canberra->Australia    +61 (402) 700 883