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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#101

Post by erulabs »

Invictus0 wrote: post #82
dfabulich wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators depl…

I don't get it--are the founders just grifters? How did this startup even make it off the drawing board?

a 1% chance of making a billion dollars is worth 1 million dollars.

Re: Starcloud

#102

Post by rozap »

ianhowson wrote: post #41

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 mediu…

Either this is performance art, or interest rates are too low.

Re: Starcloud

#103

Post by echoangle »

I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me.

There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course.

And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost when sending a datacenter to space except launch cost and shielding? Building a server farm on earth is the same price as building a satellite you can launch on a rocket as long as you use the same computers?

Re: Starcloud

#104

Post by xnx »

transpute wrote: post #58
xnx wrote: post #15

Can this possibly make financial sense even if launch costs were zero? One NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD consumes 10 kW which would be ~500 square feet of solar panels and ~100 square feet of radiator area.

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/th... > Their design calls for a cluster of shipping container-style boxes packed with high-speed AI chips. These would be anchored at the centre of a 16 sq km array of solar panels generating up to five gigawatts of power — about 25 per cent more than Drax, Britain’s biggest power station. The mammoth structure would circle the Earth in “sun synchronous” orbi…

A continuous five gigawatts of power would be seriously impressive. I think that's about $12 million/day (terrestrial prices).

This plan seems about as realistic as Bluthton though. https://www.reddit.com/r/arresteddevelopment/comments/1gtyvv...

Re: Starcloud

#105

Post by sfink »

dfabulich wrote: post #61
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…

Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators depl…

Or we could build a large vacuum chamber here on Earth and put a data center in it, if the goal is to make cooling as difficult as possible. "My data center is too hot! It's burning me!" "Put it in a giant thermos, then you won't feel it anymore."

> They also claim that they can "dramatically increase" heat dissipation with heat pumps.

Right, great idea. Start with the heat where you don't want it -- in the chip -- and pump it out to where it can't go anywhere. Then you can recirculate the medium back and have slightly older heat that you can mix with the new heat! It'll be a heat party!

It's just like a terrestrial heat pump, where you pump the heat out to where you have a huge environmental sink to transfer the heat to. In space, you have something like a hundred thousand hydrogen atoms per cubic meter to take up the heat. A HUNDRED THOUSAND! That's a bigly number, it must work out. We can always make those atoms go really, really fast!

Did an AI invent this whole scheme?

Re: Starcloud

#106

Post by ekianjo »

ianhowson wrote: post #41

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 mediu…

GPUs are not obsolete after 12 months. Look at how Nvidia is stagnating for their 50 series lineup.

The biggest problem is software. The CUDA stack is not maintained forever and certainly less than 15 years.

Re: Starcloud

#107

Post by bitmasher9 »

How do they plan on addressing the solar radiation issue? What is the solar flare risk?

A CDN for Starlink customers is probably the first use case for servers in space, not training GPT6, which will be a big enough project on familiar territory.

Re: Starcloud

#108

Post by jackmottatx »

echoangle wrote: post #103

I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost…

[dead]

Re: Starcloud

#109

Post by bitmasher9 »

arp242 wrote: post #100

Reading the paper this sounds like space Theranos. If they start producing results then I'd double check to make sure it's not just calculated on regular data centres and that they're just pretending its from their space stations. Aside from the technical concerns already raised in other comments, I'm also not sure we really want all this private for-profit usage of earth's orbit. The orbital environment is already s…

Private use of previous public resources has had mixed success, but it feels like leaving space to the public sector will doom us to being Terran bound forever.

Re: Starcloud

#110

Post by hnuser123456 »

dfabulich wrote: post #61
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…

Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators depl…

Obviously use the heat pumps to concentrate the thermal energy up to 2700k, then conduct it along a bunch of tungsten filaments, now it's the world's biggest incandescent lightbulb on top of being the first datacenter in space. Maybe get it up to 4000k for a more modern lighting look. Guess we're gonna assume the dark forest hypothesis is false.
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