“Low-carbon computing is possible!”

Paul Ben­oit and Miroslav Sviezeny foun­ded Qarnot Com­put­ing in Decem­ber 2010. Their idea was to use warmth emit­ted by com­puter serv­ers, known as “waste heat”, to heat entire build­ings. Rather than recov­er­ing this heat and trans­port­ing it some­how, they chose to trans­form the serv­ers them­selves into “radi­at­ors” that can be installed dir­ectly on premises. To do so, a cent­ral­ised digit­al plat­form sends com­puter cal­cu­la­tions – fin­an­cial cal­cu­la­tions, 3D ima­ging etc. – to the serv­ers and brin­ing the res­ults back togeth­er to recon­sol­id­ate them. These “com­puter radi­at­ors”, called QH‑1, are equipped with a ther­mo­stat and a switch, allow­ing them to be adjus­ted on demand.

Three years on, Qarnot tested its first mod­els in homes Par­is, fol­lowed by a new build in Bor­deaux. Next, they moved on to fun­drais­ing, pres­ti­gi­ous cli­ents, the devel­op­ment of a digit­al boil­er called QB‑1, and a part­ner­ship with the Casino group to heat their ware­houses. Today, the com­pany employs around 70 people, includ­ing 50 engin­eers who devel­op new “eco­lo­gic­al heat” applications.

Qarnot says it sells “eco­lo­gic­al heat”. Can you explain what that is?

Quentin Laurens. First and fore­most, Qarnot primar­ily sells a com­put­ing ser­vice, but we do make use of fatal heat that is a con­sequence of the activ­ity of serv­ers. After cre­at­ing the “com­puter radi­at­or”, i.e. heat­ing a build­ing with com­put­ing power, Qarnot exten­ded its range with a digit­al boil­er that pro­duces hot water at over 60°C. As a term to define our products and the dif­fer­ent mar­kets they address, we now say that we provide low car­bon com­put­ing. This means that we pro­duce heat or hot water from the tem­per­at­ure released by com­puter pro­cessors. Our expert­ise lies largely in the plat­form that dis­trib­utes the cal­cu­la­tions to be per­formed in a way that is totally trans­par­ent to the occu­pants of the premises where the devices are installed.

Until now, our activ­ity has mainly been of interest to two types of users: large con­sumers of com­puter pro­cessing such as banks, car­toon stu­di­os, loc­al author­it­ies or social hous­ing land­lords, and energy com­pan­ies that install our devices in their build­ings. But now there are new sec­tors that are begin­ning to take interest, par­tic­u­larly in fields like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing, flu­id mech­an­ics soft­ware and med­ic­al research.

Would you say that eco­lo­gic­al heat makes digit­al tech­no­logy “green­er”?

Be care­ful, we are not say­ing that we are zero car­bon or zero emis­sions. How­ever, we do that our tech­no­logy is more than just anoth­er low car­bon solu­tion – our mod­el is a real paradigm shift. For a data centre, you have to con­struct a build­ing, sup­ply it with energy for oper­a­tions and to cool the serv­ers, con­nect it to inter­na­tion­al net­works, install a gen­er­at­or with fuel, etc. How­ever, the Qarnot mod­el removes the need for an extern­al data centre and its sub­sequent cool­ing. The only thing needed is an energy source for the pro­cessing power, which pro­duces heat, and a fibre optic con­nec­tion. We try to optim­ise the life of serv­ers and micro­pro­cessors by using ‘peak power’ (the max­im­um power of a device) ensur­ing that good per­form­ance and heat emis­sion are com­bined. In doing so, we estim­ate that we reduce CO₂ emis­sions by 81% com­pared to a tra­di­tion­al data centre mod­el because we don’t have any neg­at­ive extern­al­it­ies, it min­im­ises the effects and impacts.

How did you cal­cu­late this reduc­tion in emis­sions?

Today, we do not have a pre­cise cal­cu­la­tion, so it is rather an estim­ate that we have cal­cu­lated ourselves. We have just launched the devel­op­ment of a cal­cu­la­tion meth­od that allows us to go to a great degree of fin­esse in meas­ur­ing the car­bon foot­print, by integ­rat­ing each of the para­met­ers (car­bon foot­print of the source of elec­tri­city depend­ing on the coun­try, mater­i­al used, rate of heat recov­ery, etc.). With this mod­el, we will be able to pre­cisely cal­cu­late con­sump­tion and quanti­fy green­house gas emis­sions of a com­puter cal­cu­la­tion or an activ­ity. This meth­od­o­logy is cur­rently being cer­ti­fied. As such we will be able to estim­ate the cost of com­put­ing in a data centre, con­sid­er­ing the dif­fer­ences in elec­tri­city prices and emis­sions across France, which pro­duces nuc­le­ar energy, and oth­er coun­tries that pro­duce elec­tri­city in coal-fired power stations.

What are the pos­sib­il­it­ies for devel­op­ing eco­lo­gic­al heat?

We recently developed and improved our QB‑1 boil­er, and we are cur­rently con­duct­ing tests with the Open Com­pute Pro­ject to recov­er serv­ers from large data centres when they renew their fleets and recon­di­tion them into boil­ers. For the moment, we are mainly selling com­put­ing or heat­ing ser­vices. In the near future, we plan to sell the boil­er as a stand-alone ser­vice, i.e. a cus­tom­er could buy boil­ers and use them for both com­put­ing and heat­ing water.

On the user side, there are many mar­kets that are inter­ested and with whom we are devel­op­ing pro­jects. Farm­ers are test­ing the Qarnot solu­tion to heat green­houses to help pro­duce toma­toes and straw­ber­ries all year round. Brew­er­ies are con­sid­er­ing using it to heat water. Heat­ing net­works, par­tic­u­larly in north­ern European coun­tries, are increas­ingly inter­ested in recovered energy. We already have pro­jects with sev­er­al cit­ies. There is no short­age of pro­jects. All these chal­lenges are excit­ing for our engin­eers because they respond to their envir­on­ment­al con­cerns. Eco­lo­gic­al heat is still in its infancy, there is much yet to come.