For having tried to install a Linux distribution on other switches with Broadcom ASIC I can tell you that having some kinds of drivers, free to use by anyone, without the need to sign an NDA, is incredible !
At my company we're working on building smart boilers, where what's actually heating the water is servers. We then send customers computation to those boilers.
This way of doing things allow us to eliminate a lot of carbon emission for computation that would otherwise have been done in classic hardware where the heat is not reused at all.
That’s a neat idea. Have you considered expanding to other applications, like home heating? It occurs to me that there are a lot of systems that produce heat as a byproduct, and a lot of other places which want heat, and bringing the two together would be a great accomplishment of efficiency.
That's what we we're doing in the first place ! Only problem is that people usually don't heat there home in the summer.. Obviously.. Meaning the compute would not be available through long time periods..
However public pool still needs to be heated, and same goes for industry that requires hot water, there production won't just stop for multiples month of the year !
I remember seeing this and think it's absolutely awesome. If I were someone with such a boiler installed in my home, would I be able to run my own workloads on the device as well? I'd be kinda sad having that much compute but only being able to use it for heat.
You can use the compute as a client of the compute interface, but not really for your own boiler.
Something worth to point out : Those boilers are more for industry oriented usage, such as heating a pool, or industry that requires hot water, not really home-grade boiler.
Thank you Mellanox. Really.