And what happens to these datacenters when the underlying GPU tech becomes obsolete within 2-3 years?
Starcloud
31–40 of 325 posts
Re: Starcloud
#32How does “passive cooling” work in space?
Massive radiators. The ISS has radiators that have a dissipation capacity of about 3m^2/kW. If we use that number, we'd need a 3000m^2 radiator per megawatt, which is the scale they're talking about. This could theoretically be brought down, but not even by an order of magnitude.
I wonder how much cooling the solar panels alone would need, when operating at that scale.
Re: Starcloud
#33Unless they've figured out some impressive cooling tech, which I would expect would be worth more than the rest of their company combined, then this is pretty much DoA. "More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space" would indeed be useful if you had a nice medium to radiate into. It turns out that thermal radiation is incredibly poor into the vacuum of space lol.
Re: Starcloud
#34I'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 beca…
I have no clue about space technology but many comments point the difficulty to cool anything in space. If Starcloud had an innovative solution to this problem, why on Earth (sic) focus on data centers when they could help the entire space industry? It does not smell good.
Re: Starcloud
#35Re: Starcloud
#36How does “passive cooling” work in space?
Passive cooling refers to "passive radiative cooling"[0]. This is a well established technique, but I have doubts on how well it will scale with the heat generated by computation.
Radiative cooling works by exploiting the fact that hot objects emit electromagnetic radiation (glow), and hot means everything above absolute zero. The glow carries away energy which cools down the object. One complication is that each glowy object is also going to be absorbing glow from other objects. While the sun, earth, and moon all emit large amounts of glow (again, heat radiation), empty space is around 2.7 Kelvin, which is very cold and has little glow. So the radiative coolers typically need to have line of sight to empty space, which allows them to emit more energy than they absorb.
Re: Starcloud
#37I'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 beca…
>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.
Their main tech breakthrough would have to be in this area otherwise the company is worthless imo.
Re: Starcloud
#38Scott Manley has published a video a few months ago explaining why putting data centers in space is an absolutely terrible idea. Lumen Orbit, the company mentioned, is a former name of Starcloud.
Re: Starcloud
#39Very ambitious but it seems futile if you’re not building the rockets yourself. Personally I’m more bullish on figuring out how to use analog chips to train models.
Re: Starcloud
#40What does space give us that Earth does not in this scenario? Free real estate? They only mention falling costs for deployment.
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