A half rack in a rack of last decade is 8kw. A half rack of today's state of the art is 100kw.

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.

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iamnothere 3 days ago | parent [-]

Part of the problem with current data centers is the density. To make the economics work, you need excessive density, which comes with power, noise, and water requirements.

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.

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aaronax 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

A Bitcoin mining node is the simplest possible way to turn compute into money. Very minimal storage and bandwidth requirements. And yet we still do not see those in houses.

Everything about doing productive computing tasks in houses is more complicated than that! At least it is more profitable, I think?

(I wonder what a rough profit per watt figure is for a datacenter. Very much "it depends" I'm sure.)

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kube-system 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The density of data centers provides efficiency gains -- if you take the same workload from a high density nvidia DGX setup in a data center and instead distribute it to Tinyboxes running residentially, you'd have an overall net gain in energy use.

	▲	iamnothere 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, along with additional costs for managing and servicing a distributed set of devices and extra redundancy needed for higher expected downtime. But maybe the cost is worth it for some application.