"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet...
That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat.
If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
Only true for our current computers and not true with reversible computing.
With reversible computing you can use electricity to perform a calculation and then "push" that electricity back into a battery or a capacitor instead of dumping it to the environment.
It's still a huge challenge, but there is a recent promising attempt:
"British reversible computing startup Vaire has demonstrated an adiabatic reversible computing system with net energy recovery"
Actually pretty cool - I was about to comment “nice perpetual motion machine” but looked into a bit more and it’s much more interesting than that (well, a real perpetual motion machine would be interesting but…)
This kind of stuff could trigger the next revolution in computing, as the theoretical energy consumption of computing is pretty insignificant. Imagine if we could make computers with near-zero energy dissipation! A "solid 3D" computer would then become possible, and Moore's law may keep going until we exhaust the new dimension ;)
I read it as the inefficient part isn't the compute efficiency, the inefficient part is dumping all the resulting heat into the environment without capturing it and using it in some way to generate electricity or do work.
On a related/side note, when there's talk about seti and dyson spheres, and detecting them via infrared waste heat, I also don't understand that. Such an alien civilization is seemingly capable of building massive space structures/projects, but then lets the waste heat just pour out into the universe in such insane quantities that we could see it tens/hundreds of light years away? What a waste. Why wouldn't they recover that heat and make use of it instead? And repeat the recovering until the final waste output is too small to bother recovering, at which point we would no longer be able to detect it.
For example, why couldn't you use the waste heat like a power plant? Use it to boil water, to turn turbines, to generate electricity, which gets sent and consumed elsewhere? Adding to the heat wherever the electricity is finally consumed. (Ignoring various losses along the way).
“Elsewhere” is still somewhere on the Dyson sphere.
Or if you magically beam 100% of the captured energy somewhere else, now that place gets to deal with shedding the heat from however many 1e26W+ of power were consumed. God help the poor planet you aim that ray of death at.
There is no other alternative! If I build a perfect Dyson sphere and capture the energy output of a star, all of that energy will become heat. The average surface temperature of my Dyson sphere will be (IIRC) the ratio of the surface area of the sphere to that of the contained star, multiplied by the star's effective surface temperature.
"Recovering heat and making use of it" requires a heat differential. You need a cold side and a hot side to use energy. Using that energy causes the cold side to heat and the hot side to cool, until they reach equilibrium. The further the difference, the more usable work you can do. The closer the two sides are, the less work you can do.
Someone else here said it best: waste heat is the graveyard of energy. Once you have used energy, it will become high-entropy, low-grade, diffuse heat which is difficult-to-impossible to extract further work from.
These days it's not rare to have data center heated buildings. I guess crypto bros are just not thinking about this. But technically if could be done there too.
There was a startup in EU which explicitly sold heat from crypto mining to the local energy provider. IIRC it was also here on hacker news some time ago.
Heat is the graveyard of energy. Everything that uses energy, or is energy, is actually just energy on it's way to the graveyard.
The energy of the universe is a pool of water a top a cliff. Water running off this cliff is used to do stuff (work), and the pool at the bottom is heat.
The "heat death of the universe" is referring to this water fall running dry, and all the energy being in this useless pool of "heat".
Do thermophotovoltaic cells operate on different kind of heat?
Is it impossible to convert heat into other forms of energy without "consuming" materials like in the case of steam, geothermal or even the ones that need a cold body to utilize thermoelectric effect.
TPVs don't rely solely on the temperature of an object being high, they instead rely on two objects on either side having different temperatures. As heat moves[1] from one side to the other some of the energy from that movement is turned in to electricity.
[1]: Technically the movement itself is heat, the objects don't contain heat, rather they contain internal energy, but the two get mixed up more often than not.
Almost none. A long time ago a friend and I did the math for sound, photons (status LEDs), etc and it was a rounding error of 1% or something silly like that.
And that’s ignoring that sound and photon emissions typically hit a wall or other physical surface and get converted back to heat.
It all ends up as heat in the end, just depends on where that heat is dumped and if you need to cool it or not. Most watts end up being even more than the theoretical heat per watt due to said cooling needs.
There is literally no way around the fact that every watt you burn for compute ends up as a watt of waste heat. The only factor you can control is how many units of compute you can achieve with that same watt.
Well, at least until somebody devises a system that transports or projects it so that the heat ends up somewhere not-Earth. It'd still be heating the universe in general, of course, even in the form of sprays of neutrinos.
That reminds me of a sci-fi book, Sundiver by David Brin, where a ship is exploring the sun by firing a "refrigerator laser" to somehow pump-away excess heat and balance on the thrust.
That's not correct. For ordinary computers there is Landauer's principle, which gives a theoretical lower limit for the energy needed for computation [0].
I say "ordinary computers" because other comments mentioned "reversible computers" for which this limit doesn't apply.
According to the linked wikipedia page, this theoretical limit is around a billion times smaller than current computers use for an operation, so you may call me pedantic.
If I use energy to move a block one foot over, I have performed useful work. But 100% of the energy used to perform that work is either already heat or shortly will be.
If I turn my fan on and 100% of the electricity is converted to heat, where does the kinetic energy of moving fan blades come from? Even the Trump administration cannot just repeal the law of conservation of energy.
Even if most of the energy goes into kinetic energy of the air, that air will lose momentum via turbulence and friction with the surrounding air, which will end up as... heat.
While spinning, the blades store a miniscule amount of kinetic energy.
After removing power even that small amount ends up as heat through friction ( both in the bearing but mostly in the air turbulence). And the blades end up in the same zero energy state: sitting still.
Most of that energy gets transfered to the air that's being moved by the blades, and who knows what that air does eventually. And we're not even talking about the plant growing light that might be sitting in my room near my house plants literally creating new life from electricity.
We do know what that air does eventually. Given no further inputs of energy, it swirls around generating friction, raising its temperature (heat!) as the currents slow down to nearly nothing.
There’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level.
The minimum amount of energy needed to compute decreased asymptotically to 0 as the temperature of space goes to 0. This is the reason a common sci-fi trope where advanced civilizations hibernate for extremely long times so that they can do more computation with available energy.
In the book Calculating God, a character notes that this is a common civilization-wide choice. Living in virtual reality, rather than trying to expand into the vast expanses of space, is a common trope as much as it's a logical choice. It neatly explains the Fermi Paradox. In some fiction, like The Matrix, the choice might be forced due to cultural shifts, but the outcome is the same. A relatively sterile low-energy state civilization doing pure processing.
True. But it's not a binary choice. All it takes is to make one sub-optmial choice for the universe to be filled up with von-neuman probes in all star systems
Heat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.
How many computer things you got done per unit electricity, and how many mechanical things you do with the temperature gradient between the computer and its heat sync.
For example, kinda wasteful to cook eggs with new electrons when you could use the computer heat to help you denature those proteins. Or just put the heat in human living spaces.
(Putting aside how practical that actually is... Which it isn't)
No its not. It would be waste only if the there is a high temperature gradient, which is minimized in mining operation through proper cooling.
It's that computation requires electricity. And almost all of the heat in bitcoin mining comes from computation, technically changing transistor state.
I think what they mean is that there is not a Carnot engine hooked up between the heat source and sink. Which theoretically something the data center could do about it.
I would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.
It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity.
(And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)
> The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.
Computational results do not contain stored potential energy. There is no such thing as energy being "used up" doing computation such that it doesn't end as waste heat.
Right, but if it's noticeably hotter than the environment, then that temperature difference could be used to drive a heat engine and get some more useful work. So the knee-jerk response "omg, we see the heat from space? it's gotta be wasteful!" is kind of correct, in theory.
Some people are saying "waste heat" in the technical sense of "the heat my industrial process created and I need to get rid of" and others are saying "waste heat" as "heat humans are emitting into space without slapping at least one Carnot engine on it yet".
If the heat being generated were economically worthwhile, the miners would be incentivized to use it to offset their costs. Since they aren't, we can somewhat reasonably assume that it would cost more to recapture than it's probably worth.
That is 100% the issue. This is really low quality heat. Making it better would require even more energy input (e.g. a heat pump) because we can’t safely run electronics hot enough to generate high quality process heat.
Rockdale is a small town of ~5000 residents. Even if it were practical to install district heating - which I don't think it is - there certainly isn't demand for hundreds of megawatts of it.
Well It it's using solar power it's just moving heat from one place to another.
I guess, if it's using fossil fuel to generate power it's also just moving heat from one place to another, but really really slowly. The relevant factor there is that the long term storage was performing a important secondary function of holding a lot of co2.
It's in Texas, surely that's an area amenable to solar production. What are they actually using there.
The economics of bitcoin mining dictate that the work must have no other utility. If you increase its profitability by using it for auxiliary winter heating, then more people will mine bitcoin until there is an oversupply of heating and we return to the current equilibrium amount of "wasted" heat.
This seems to indicate a serious misunderstanding of both bitcoin's economics as well as the feasibility of having an "oversupply of heating". Hundreds of millions to over a billion people globally lack reliable energy for lighting, heating, and cooking. And bitcoin's economics don't dictate that mining never have a side benefit.
You're right, it's not leaking, it's dumping excess heat on purpose.
However, I get triggered whenever someone uses the term "by design" wrongly. The generation of heat is not by design. It's an undesired side-effect of the computing being done. "By design" would mean that someone decided that there should be a certain amount of heat generation and made sure that it happens.
Most often I see this term misuse from developers who explain bugs as being "by design". It happens when two features interact in an undesired way that creates problems (a bug). Developers like to look at feature A in isolation, determine that it works as designed, then look at feature B, determine that it also works as designed, then they look at and understand the interaction between feature A and B and since they now understand what is happening, they claim it's "by design". However, nobody ever decided that feature A and B should interact this way. It was clearly an oversight and every normal person would agree that the interaction is undesired and a bug. But the developer says "won't fix, this is by design". Infuriating!
When you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.
I'm not sure if you're trolling. Of course that's nonsense. The work is entirely the (artificially complex) computations necessary to get to the result. If someone were to invent a 100% efficient computer, based on superconductors, which produces no heat at all, the proof of work (the final hash value) would still be equally valid. As I said, heat is an undesired, unavoidable side-effect. You don't show anybody the heat you produced, to convince them that you did the work, you show them the hash value, otherwise you could just burn some wood.
That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.