We all know how much heat computers generate. Take a few hundreds of them together and you can start to believe this rather strange sounding story. A new computer center in Switzerland is making novel use of the hot air thrown off by its servers and communications equipment: The heat is being funneled next door to warm the local swimming pool.

The town pool in Uitikon, Switzerland, outside Zurich, will be the beneficiary of the waste heat from a data center recently built by IBM Corp. for GIB-Services AG.

While air conditioners struggle day and night to keep the computers cold, the hot air is pumped out into the atmosphere. Basically its wasted. However in this case it will travel through heat exchangers which shall use it to heat up their swimming pools.

Steven Sams, a data center services vice president for IBM, said the Swiss project should be a model. After all, IBM says, the computers in the Uitikon center will throw off enough heat to warm as many as 80 houses.

Just imagine what would happen if Google were to implement this technology on their data centres.

Source