Heating as a Cloud-Service, A Position Paper

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a novel utility computing approach, implemented by the company Qarnot computing in private clouds. The approach promotes a new computing paradigm in which computers are considered as machines that produce both data and heat. It is based on two main technologies: a new model of servers and a new resource manager for servicing both computing and heating as a cloud-service. This paper focuses on the resource manager promoted by this utility computing approach. We summarize the architecture of the middleware and describe the key computational challenges. We also provide a per- formance characterization on the thermal comfort and processing time. Some preliminary results show that the proposed utility computing app- roach can lead to distributed systems that are competitive with both traditional cloud solutions and heating systems.