billski
Active member
Well, sort of 
"To stay warm this winter, many of us will rely on heating systems that move hot water or hot air through vents, pipes, or radiators. But imagine if the heat transfer medium was packets of data. In a paper presented in June at the 2011 Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, researchers from Microsoft and the University of Virginia proposed the idea of letting huge banks of computers double as so-called data furnaces. The researchers envision splitting up and dispersing giant data centers so that the immense amounts of heat they generate can warm the buildings where they're located instead of being vented into the air outside. The home or business owner would pay a one-time fee to get the data furnace installed. The cloud service provider, which would still own the servers, would act as a utility, charging a rate comparable to what a homeowner would pay to run a conventional furnace."
source: ieee.org
"To stay warm this winter, many of us will rely on heating systems that move hot water or hot air through vents, pipes, or radiators. But imagine if the heat transfer medium was packets of data. In a paper presented in June at the 2011 Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, researchers from Microsoft and the University of Virginia proposed the idea of letting huge banks of computers double as so-called data furnaces. The researchers envision splitting up and dispersing giant data centers so that the immense amounts of heat they generate can warm the buildings where they're located instead of being vented into the air outside. The home or business owner would pay a one-time fee to get the data furnace installed. The cloud service provider, which would still own the servers, would act as a utility, charging a rate comparable to what a homeowner would pay to run a conventional furnace."
source: ieee.org
