Computing Heaters -- An Energy-Efficient Way to Provide Computing Services

New data centers for cloud services rapidly increase energy consumption of IT services. Now electricity is used both to power the computing hardware and to remove the heat computing generates. On the other hand, heating is needed e.g. for buildings and for hot water. However, reusing heat from data centers, e.g. for district heating, is complicated and expensive because of relatively low temperature of exhaust heat and a need for expensive infrastructure investments. In this paper, we will study the feasibility and the technical solutions for distributing computing to where heating is needed. For this purpose compact and reliable computing-heating units redeveloped. Computing tasks are distributed to these units based on the heating requirements in their environment. In this way the electricity used for computing is substituting the energy of the heating elements.