Q.Rad Meshes Open Source Software, High Performance Computing and Heat

Can open source software heat your house? High-performance computing (HCP) provider Qarnot thinks so. The company has produced a Linux-based device called the Q.rad that delivers heat while also crunching numbers in the cloud.

Qarnot sells rendering services for Blender, an open source animation app. Most companies would probably use a server farm or a cloud service to perform the intensive computing operations necessary to render video content.

But Qarnot takes a different approach, as CEO Paul Benoît explained in a recent interview. The company distributes Q.rads to ordinary people to use in their homes and offices.

The devices download information from the Internet to do Blender rendering, and the excess heat they generate is reused to keep living and working spaces warm. It’s a win-win for Qarnot and cold people alike.

It’s also a win for fans of open source, since the Q.rad software is based on Docker images running on top of the Linux kernel.

There are some limitations to this setup, of course. For one, although Qarnot doesn’t charge users any fees to operate the Q.rad, the electricity bill is on them. Since gas is still a cheaper heat source for most consumers than electricity, the Q.rad is probably not the most cost-efficient way to heat your home or office.

For another, the Q.rad is also not a general-purpose computing device that you can use toward personal ends. It only does Blender rendering and remains under the control of Qarnot.

Still, Qarnot’s HPC strategy is pretty innovative. It effectively creates a distributed private cloud that helps to minimize waste. Most datacenters expend vast amounts of energy powering servers, then use even more electricity to keep them from overheating. The Q.rad helps eliminate that hugely wasteful inefficiency.