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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#41

Post by ianhowson »

I had a good laugh.

- You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price.

- You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet.

- You need a heat transport medium to move heat into your massive radiator. Either you use water or you use air or you use heatpipes (metal). You have to pay for the cost and weight and launch expense. This is probably half the weight of the rack and I haven't bothered to do the math about how you transport heat into a 500 foot solar sail.

- Let's not even talk about how you need to colocate multiple other racks for compute and storage. There aren't any 1TBps orbital link technologies.

- Rad shielding? It doesn't work, but I'll let this slide; it seems like the least problematic part of the proposal.

- 15 year lifetime? GPUs are obsolete after 12 months.

I don't want to be the guy who shoots stuff down just for fun, but this doesn't even pass the sniff test. Maybe you can get 10x cheaper power and cooling in space. Still doesn't work.

Re: Starcloud

#43

Post by vasco »

jedberg wrote: post #25

I'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 to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult

Routing through starlink should have direct LoS at all times.

Re: Starcloud

#44

Post by NitpickLawyer »

jsheard wrote: post #28

Aside 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.

> They tend to use really old silicon processes in space stuff for that reason.

To be fair that's mostly part "if it works don't change it" and part "that's how we've always done it". SpX uses newer hardware w/ traditional OSs (linux) w/ lots of redundancy.

Re: Starcloud

#46

Post by richardwhiuk »

dilyevsky wrote: post #16
zamalek wrote: post #5

What does space give us that Earth does not in this scenario? Free real estate? They only mention falling costs for deployment.

There's an answer in their whitepaper[0] - see Table 1. tl;dr - power is continuous and free via solar array [0] - https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

Free in the sense of astronomical capital and operational costs.

Re: Starcloud

#47

Post by 827a »

abetaha wrote: post #23

Definitely 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?

Given the purported cost benefits in their whitepaper [1], hardware failures might be an irrelevant rounding error. They suggest something to the tune of 100x cheaper.

[1] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

Re: Starcloud

#48

Post by cj »

dilyevsky wrote: post #16
zamalek wrote: post #5

What does space give us that Earth does not in this scenario? Free real estate? They only mention falling costs for deployment.

There's an answer in their whitepaper[0] - see Table 1. tl;dr - power is continuous and free via solar array [0] - https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

> “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology… there’s no way to get there without a breakthrough… we need fusion or we need radically cheaper solar plus storage or something” -Sam Altman

It's kind of depressing that the only way to make this tech better is to feed it more energy. (And apparently now to send it to space)

Re: Starcloud

#49

Post by daeken »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #37
jedberg wrote: post #25

I'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.

It's possible to do all of this with current technology. Just... Why? The cost would be exorbitant; even with really clever deployment tech, the launch costs are gonna be dominated by solar panels and radiators.

This is a super cool idea and seems like perfect investor-bait. That's about where it ends.

Re: Starcloud

#50

Post by thrance »

justanotheratom wrote: post #3

wow, one year back, I had made a prediction to a friend that this is the direction that Starlink will head in. I was thinking it would proceed like this: 1. provide internet. 2. provide CDN. 3. Edge Compute. 4. Full-on cloud. These guys see to be focussing on what is basically offline processing (AI training).

More like, these guys will be focused on parting VCs from their money.

Datacenters in space makes no sense at all. Even ignoring the huge cost of sending hardware there in the first place, cooling is a massive issue in space. No medium to sink heat into means the only way to cool anything is by running water through giant infrared radiators. Not ideal when cooling is the largest bottleneck in scaling datacenters. Note that they would also have to dissipate the large amounts heat their datacenter satellite gets from being exposed to the Sun.

Also disregard the cost it takes to send a technician for maintenance, of updating hardware, etc.

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