How does “passive cooling” work in space?
Large radiators like on the ISS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
Starcloud
21–30 of 325 posts
Re: Starcloud
#22How does “passive cooling” work in space?
Large radiators like on the ISS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
With an emphasis on large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control?wpr...
> Most spacecraft radiators reject between 100 and 350 W of internally generated electronics waste heat per square meter.
Re: Starcloud
#23Definitely an out of this world idea. I wonder if their micro datacenter is going to be self-sufficient power wise using only solar energy? And how would they address the hardware failures that are likely when you train large language models at scale?
Re: Starcloud
#24How I sniffed and stole training data and model data over the air to "Starcloud" posts gonna be crazy amount in abundance
Re: Starcloud
#25I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing.
At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel because of this.
So the next thought was space. At the time, launching to space was way too costly for it to ever make sense. But now, with much cheaper launches, space is accessible.
Power seems easily solved. You can get lots of free energy from the sun with some modest panels. But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult. Or you can go geostationary over a powerful ground station, but then you'd need some really big batteries for all the time you aren't in the sun.
But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution.
Re: Starcloud
#26Re: Starcloud
#27space debris, radiation and no maintenance.
The buzzwords sure sound cool, but make absolutely no sense.
Re: Starcloud
#28Aside from the obvious cooling issues people have already mentioned, isn't cosmic radiation also very unkind to modern ultra dense silicon? AIUI they tend to use really old silicon processes in space stuff for that reason, and even then they have to build in redundant compute to mitigate logic errors that probably wouldn't happen on Earth.
Re: Starcloud
#29When I read something like this I fell that I am wasting my time working on a B2B SaaS.
Re: Starcloud
#30It sounds like their vision for space-based data centers presupposes nearly-free energy costs, delivered via a colossal solar farm made possible by falling launch costs.
Temporarily putting aside (extremely fair) feasibility questions around those two pre-requisites, data centers are a not-bad choice for things to do with unlimited space energy.
Aluminum smelting or growing food are the two I’d think of otherwise, and neither of those can have inputs/outputs beamed to a global network of high-bandwidth satellites.