BCS wrote:
Even if you have network parallelism, CPU loads still costs money. Many server farms are not space limited but power limited. They can't get enough power out of the power company to run more servers. (And take a guess at what there power bills cost!)
I've often wondered why the server farms aren't located in Alaska, for free cooling, and the waste heat used to heat local businesses. They can turn a cost (cooling) into a revenue source (charge local businesses for heat).
There's a peculiar old brick building in downtown Seattle that was called the "steam plant". I always wondered what a "steam plant" did, so I asked one of the tourist guides downtown. He said that the steam plant had a bunch of boilers which would generate steam, which was then piped around to local businesses to heat their buildings, as opposed to the later practice of each building getting their own boiler.
So, the idea has precedent.
