Heating as a Cloud-Service, A Position Paper (Industrial Presentation)

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 performance characterization on the thermal comfort and processing time. Some preliminary results show that the proposed utility computing approach can lead to distributed systems that are competitive with both traditional cloud solutions and heating systems.