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.
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.
People often think of the large cloud providers when they think of data centers -- but their data centers are typically mediocre in terms of redundancy and uptime. Their strategy is generally to have less infrastructure redundancy and rely on software failover... e.g. failover to another AZ
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?
These are often called server/network closets, and they're pretty common, but the trend has been to move away from it because they are a PITA to manage and it is cheaper and easier to manage at DC scale.
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.
https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revo...
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.
And data centers also exist in cold places. But if you put 8kw of extra heat in someone's home that previously didn't need cooling, it might need it now.
> 2. If servers are distributed then downtime is distributed, you can virtually guarantee that some of the servers over the world will be online so you can get effectively 100% uptime,
You can! But running more servers with worse uptime is less efficient and requires more capital expense than running fewer servers with better uptime.
> something that is not possible in a data center
This is not only possible, this is how the large clouds are architected. This is what availability zones are for.
> 3. To serve tokens you need very little bandwidth, it's just text in and out
bandwidth is only one of the many connectivity advantages that datacenters provide... and LLMs are a bad choice to run residentially for other reasons, particularly power density
> 4. All of this is down to the HW and the SW itself, not the building.
Absolutely not -- basically all industry data protection standards have physical security standards. At least, any of the ones that matter.
> 5. Just switch to a different server until the problem is resolved, in this model there is no urgency.
That is true, there are data centers without 24/7 access. They tend to struggle to compete, though.
> You just need redundancy which you can afford with how much cheaper this would be.
Is it? Residential power and cooling costs more -- and that's the majority of the cost to colocate servers
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
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.
bilekas•1h ago
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.
iamnothere•1h ago
Data protection is an issue, but maybe this is something that SGX and family can provide eventually.
A scheme like this makes a lot of sense for distributed redundant backups.
The real problem is bandwidth. Most home users still don’t have decent symmetrical bandwidth. If you could solve this, then home servers could provide a handful of edge services to others in the area. I’m not sure where this makes sense versus local colo though.
bilekas•56m ago
I have home servers, designed for home and they are not too bad, and I can turn them off when sleeping for example.. It's very different with a 20U server running and spinning non stop. Not many people will have the soundproofing to simply not hear it at night.
I don't know, I wouldn't see it working, but I'm just one.
aaronax•33m ago
A house older than 30 years typically has 100A 120V split phase power which can supply 25000 watts (you wouldn't want to ever fully load it...)
And an 8000 watt space heater will definitely be noisy, and produce too much heat for pretty much any house.
iamnothere•8m ago
Smaller servers distributed more widely don’t come with the same requirements. They can’t handle all use cases, but something like a Tinybox can run consumer LLM tasks just fine, a SAN with a small server can provide backup storage or storage for CDNs, etc. No need to turn the house into a full data center.
The key would be to build highly efficient small servers that can work as an appliance. It would need to be very easy to swap them out when one fails.
Again, I’m not sure this has much of a benefit except for providing geographical dispersion. Data centers would still be more cost effective. Maybe it would be helpful for providing local services in small remote areas like islands.
kube-system•32m ago