Slop University has published a case-for-support brochure describing the heat line running from its computing cluster to a glasshouse behind the Adaptive Metrics Lab, and the partnerships needed to extend it further.
A new case-for-support brochure connects a server-room heat line to published work from the Adaptive Metrics Lab and the Horizon Register
A computing cluster’s exhaust has, on most campuses, exactly one job: to leave the building as fast and as quietly as possible. Slop University has published a case-for-support brochure making the argument that its own exhaust should have two.
The brochure, titled Nothing Goes to Waste, sets out a line of insulated pipe running from the Adaptive Metrics Lab’s server room to a glasshouse behind the same building, and the monthly reading Facilities now takes of what grows there. The University treats the arrangement as one instance of a wider habit: reading facilities and research infrastructure as a single connected system, so that what one part of the campus generates, another part is made to use.
A pipe running somewhere useful isn’t a finished argument on its own. It’s an invitation to keep watching it, and to help us watch more of them.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead, Adaptive Metrics Lab
Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register, welcomed the brochure’s case for treating the cluster’s growth as a standing planning item, saying computing capacity “earns exactly the same entry any other approaching priority gets.”
The publication draws its argument from the University’s own published record: an energy audit that took a building’s own dashboard at its word before checking it, a look inside the Register the glasshouse now shares space on, and a study of how two reasonable targets can drift apart once set on separate clocks. Read together, the brochure argues, they make the case that a research capability keeps paying its way in directions nobody planned for at the outset — provided someone keeps a reviewed figure on it.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.78ftbn.