We work with companies and data centres to reduce the carbon footprint of their offline batch cloud compute.

Lower carbon compute

Each heata unit uses 56% less electricity and saves 1 tonne of carbon per year vs a typical data centre plus hot water heating [1]. This is because we avoid an air conditioning energy cost, and offset a domestic hot water heating cost. So not only is your compute having a positive climate impact, but it's also having a positive social impact too.

You can find out more about how it works below.

Cloud native compute

We support Kubernetes; deploy and manage your heata workloads online with Rancher, kubectl and within your existing platform as part of a hybrid cloud set-up. If you have specific requirements, let us know.

Security

We're building the heata network on SUSE's secure edge platform which has been designed to provide enterprise grade security in physically exposed public infrastructure. Our software partner is Securelinx, a SUSE platinum partner with over twenty years' experience ensuring secure enterprise grade outcomes for businesses using Open Source solutions.

Meet the heata unit

A powerful compute server that attaches to domestic hot water cylinders, the heat generated by the processing is transferred into the cylinder using a patented thermal transfer mechanism.

Find out more

Try out the heata network

If sustainability is important to your business, the heata network could help you reduce the climate impact of your batch compute workloads, as well as provide free hot water to households that are struggling to pay their fuel bills.

The heata network can run any offline batch compute but not 'real-time' services like websites and apps. If you have a suitable workload, we'd love to hear from you. Here are some examples of the types of work we can undertake:

Computation finance and risk analysis
Higher education research and supercomputing
Medical research and data processing
Climate modelling

I'd like to run a test workload

FAQ

A 'host' is the household with the heata unit installed on their hot water cylinder.

What kind of workloads can the heata network run?

High-volume, repetitive data jobs that don’t require ‘real time’ processing. Areas such as computational finance and risk analysis, higher education research and supercomputing, medical research and data processing, and climate modelling.

What kind of software does the heata network use?

It uses open-source VM / container orchestration, and identifies which units are available for work, their utilisation, and network connectivity.

What kind of carbon saving does the heata unit offer?

Each heata unit saves approximately 1 tonne of carbon dioxide per year, vs a typical data centre + household water heating.

What is the PUE for the heata network?

By factoring in the energy that we save on water heating, we think we can get close to a PUE of 0.3. A typical data centre has a PUE of about 1.6. (PUE = Power Usage Effectiveness.)

How much heat is transferred to the water?

The heata unit transfers around 80% of the energy consumed to the tank; volume production will allow an even more efficient design, with future units anticipated to transfer 90%+ to the water.

Does the heata unit use the host’s broadband?

No, the heata unit uses its own connection, which will either be its own dedicated fibre line, or connection via 4G / 5G.

How secure is the heata network - is my data safe?

Very secure, we’re working with SUSE, leveraging their secure edge platform, providing enterprise grade security in physically exposed public infrastructure, eg mobile base stations.

Storage is inaccessible if removed from appliance; LUKS / AES-256 Fully Encrypted Drive, key secured with industry standard TPM 2.0 (ISO/IEC 11889) on motherboard.

Compute customer’s jobs are unaware of, and cannot be accessed by other customer’s jobs; LXD containerised isolation / sandboxed tasks.

Compute job’s access to the network will be removed once a job is finished or in event of suspicious behavior; remote access via unique revocable AES-256 private keys.

Compute loads are on a Private Subnet, isolated from the home network; all network traffic goes out through VPN out to the wider internet. Compute jobs are unable to access the host’s wifi and we use per unit AES-256 encrypted VPNs to the control server.

Could a host gain access to the heata unit?

The unit can’t be altered by an attacker; the BIOS is locked and boots to the supplied storage only, there are chassis intruder alarms and all peripherals are disabled and physically inaccessible.

Still have questions? Get in touch

References

CO₂ saving is based on electricity generating 0.307kg/kWh {0.283 kg/kWh (generation)[2] + 0.024kg/kWh (distribution)[2]}. Typical Data Centre + domestic hot water: 680W/hour (300W compute + 180W air conditioning[3] + 200W hot water). Heata: 300W/hour (300W compute, including 200W harnessed from waste heat). Average UK domestic hot water energy use: 4.67kWh[4]. Therefore average hourly hot water power consumption = 195W. We’ve rounded up to 200W for simplicity of calculations.
Greenhouse Gas Reporting Conversion Factors 2018.
Ni, Jiacheng & Bai, Xuelian. (2017). A review of air conditioning energy performance in data centers. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. 67. 10.1016/j.rser.2016.09.050.
Measurement of Domestic Hot Water Consumption in Dwellings.