A joint design research project (HES-SO) between ECAL, HEAD, EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL
Using excess heat generated by data centers to warm homes isn’t a new idea. Earlier in our research we stumbled upon Qarnot, a french company proposing to decentralize the data center into meshed radiators to distribute computing resources across people’s homes (we’re guessing they took their name from Carnot’s Limit ;). They announced a partnership with the city of Paris to heat 350 low-income housings in 2013.
However, they are not the only rats in the race…
Both images taken from the website Green Data Center Design and Management / “Data Center Design Consideration: Cooling” (03.2015). Source: http://macc.umich.edu.
ASHRAE is a “global society advancing human well-being through sustainable technology for the built environment”.
A typical question that arise with data centers is the need to cool down the overheating servers they contain. The more they will compute, the more they’ll heat, consume energy, but also will therefore be in need to be cooled down, so to stay in operation (wide range of operation would be between 10°C – 30°C). While the optimal server room temperature seem to be around 20-21°C, ~27°C for recent and professional machines (Google recommends 26.7°C).
The exact temperature of function is subject to discussion and depends on the hardware.
Yet, in every data center comes the question of air conditioning and air flow. In this case, it always revolves around the upper drawing (variations around this organization): 1° cold air aisles, floors or areas need to be created or maintained, where the servers will take their refreshing fluid and 2° hot air aisles, ceilings or areas need to be managed where the heated air will need to be released and extracted.
Second drawing shows that humidity is important as well depending on heat.
As hot air, inflated and lighter, naturally moves up while cold air goes down, many interesting and possibly natural air streams could be imagined around this air configuration …
Note: When we had to pick an open source cloud computing platform at the start of our research, we dug for some time to pick the one that would better match with our planned activities. We chose ownCloud and explained our choice in a previous post, so as some identified limitations linked to it. Early this year came this announcement by ownCloud that it will initiate “Global Interconnected Private Clouds for Universities and Researchers” (with early participants such has the CERN, ETHZ, SWITCH, TU-Berlin, University of Florida, University of Vienna, etc.) So it looks like we’ve picked the right open platform! Especially also because they are announcing a mesh layer on top of different clouds to provide common access across globally interconnected organizations.
This comforts us in our initial choice and the need to bridge it with the design community, especially as this new “mesh layer” is added to ownCloud, which was something missing when we started this project (from ownCloud version 7.0, this scalability became available though). It now certainly allows what we were looking for: a network of small and personal data centers. Now the question comes back to design: if personal data centers are not big undisclosed or distant facilities anymore, how could they look like? For what type of uses? If the personal applications are not “file sharing only” oriented, what could they become? For what kind of scenarios?
“World Brain” by Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon (2015)
World Brain proposes a stroll through motley folkloric tales : data centers, animal magnetism, the Internet as a myth, the inner lives of rats, how to gather a network of researchers in the forest, how to survive in the wild using Wikipedia, how to connect cats and stones…
The world we live in often resembles a Borgesian story. Indeed, if one wanted to write a sequel to Borges’ Fictions, he could do it simply by putting together press articles.
The World Brain is made out mostly of found materials : videos downloaded on Youtube, images, scientific or pseudo scientific reports, news feeds… [...] World Brain takes the viewer through a journey inside the physical places by which the Internet transits: submarine cables, data centers, satellites. The film adopts the point of view of the data. The audience view the world as if they were information, crossing the planet in an instant, copied in an infinite number of instances or, at the contrary, stored in secret places.
More projects by S. Degoutin and G. Wagon on their Nogovoyage website.
The Cité du Design in Saint Etienne (France) had an exhibit about cloud computing few months ago. It was part of an initiative by Orange, the French telco, that asked design students to speculate about “the personal digital space of tomorrow.” The question they addressed are the following:
“What new uses? How to organize this space for storing personal data? How to avoid being overwhelmed by all the content that we unwinttingly store in it on a daily basis? How to make the memories that we capture on video and in photos more accessible? How can we easily send all or part of this special prvate space to the people we love? Can we find a new material or emotional value for this data?“
Note: we mentioned this “bookazine”, Clog, in our bibliography (Clog, (2012). Data Space, Clog online), at the very early stages of our design-research project. It is undoubtedly one of the key references for this project, mostly related to thinking, territory, space and therefore rather oriented toward the architecture field. It will certainly serve in the context of our workshop with the architects (in collaboration with ALICE) next week, but not only, as it states some important stakes related to data in general. This very good and inspiring magazine is driven by a pool of editors that are Kyle May (editor in chief, we invited him as a jury member when we –fabric | ch with Tsinghua University– organized a call during 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, curtated by Beatrice Galilee), Julia van den Hout, Jacob Reidel, Archie Lee Coates, Jeff Franklin.
The edition is unfortunately sold out. Reason why I assembled several images from the bookazine (for the research sake) in a pdf that can be downloaded here (60mb).
Part of our bibliography (among different works by architects –K. Varnelis– or about the Internet infrastructure –T. Arnall, A. Blum–) and published in Clog (2012), this thesis work by R. Donaghy presents an interesting hack of the data center infrastructure (centered on the hardware and mostly on the object “data center” in this case).
The work is digital published online on ISUU and can be accessed here (p. 134-150).
... Along the design research, we are going through many different types of references that we don't necessarily post or document ...
The website presenting the downloadable results of the joint design and ethnographic research Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) is now ...