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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#111

Post by ryandamm »

Cooling in space was covered by XKCD's Randall Munroe in pretty entertaining detail here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUBRd1O2dU

TL;DR... cooling in space isn't passive, you're on the "inside" of an enormous vacuum flask. And radiative coupling with space is possible from the ground, if that's what you're interested in:

https://www.skycoolsystems.com

But god bless crazy entrepreneurs. Don't ask whether we can, definitely don't ask if we should, just ask whether it makes for good headlines...

Re: Starcloud

#112

Post by slashdev »

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…

I agree, this is makes no sense at all.

Can I take the other side of this investment? Like an angel funding round, but selling short?

Re: Starcloud

#113

Post by abetaha »

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?

The white paper back of the envelope calculations show a 4km x 4km solar panels and radiators are required for a 5 GW datacenter. I am not sure how the authors were not cracking up while writing that white paper.

Re: Starcloud

#117

Post by echoangle »

daeken wrote: post #32
thekoma wrote: post #7

How 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.

The radiators on the ISS aren’t passive though, they have actively pumped fluid loops to get heat from the hot parts into the radiators.

Re: Starcloud

#118

Post by stephenhandley »

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…

I was trying to put these sizes in rough perspective. ISS is the largest man-made object in space, which is basically the size of a football field (half a hectare) and cost $150B. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/comparison-of-size-of-int...

The whitepaper shows a 4km x 4km solar array, which is 1600 hectares (3200 International Space Stations). Would assume the array they're proposing would be cheaper since its structurally more homogenous, but $480 trillion dollars is a whole lot of money.

Re: Starcloud

#119

Post by ekianjo »

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.

Does SpaceX also use old silicon for Starlink and other projects?

Re: Starcloud

#120

Post by azinman2 »

matt-p wrote: post #92
daeken wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Genuinely most "AI" DCs are spending less than 9KW on cooling for every 100KW of servers. If you were that bothered about getting that to zero, you could literally sink them into the ocean, build a heat network so the town can take the heat for free or use any of a dozen more established and practical ways to do that.

Please don’t suggest heating the ocean! Someone might just go to try to do that. The ocean is already warming too much!
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