Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starcloud

ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 325 posts

Re: Starcloud

#171

Post by trebligdivad »

lxgr wrote: post #148
esperent wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem Nonetheless getting rid of heat (by radiation) is possible, otherwise people would be roasted inside the ISS. I'm sure all of these companies are advertising "ChatGPT in Space!" because that's what will generate hype and money, but what they'll actually be planning is very small edge data centers whose job is to reduce latency. Whethe…

> very small edge data centers whose job is to reduce latency Reduce latency to where?

Could this be a military image processing use? - imagining you're scooping up earth observation in real time, if you AI analysed it locally and then just sent a 'Missile at coordinate.....' and then just the image where you spotted it, it wouldn't be so much the latency as the bandwidth reduction.

Re: Starcloud

#172

Post by matt-p »

azinman2 wrote: post #120
matt-p wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's already being done all over the place. It's not particularly damaging compared to the alternatives.

Re: Starcloud

#173

Post by echoangle »

amelius wrote: post #135
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…

Read the "Thermal Management" section, page 8 ...

I believe that it’s physically possible to build something like this, but there’s no way it will be cheaper or simpler than cooling on earth. In their comparison table (table 1), they have earth based cooling for a 40 MW cluster over ten years at 7 million dollars and on the right side calculate the space cost as $0 (although they only imply that it would be cheaper than on earth by saying it’s „more efficient“). If you believe that their cooling system will be less than 7 million with enough redundancy for 10 years (or alternatively maintenance or replacement missions), I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not happening.

Re: Starcloud

#174

Post by godelski »

amluto wrote: post #69
vonneumannstan wrote: post #33

Unless 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.

Space (with a sunshade) is a nearly perfect medium into which to radiate heat, in the sense that there’s nothing better. But I agree with your general point. At 100°C, you can radiate about 1kW/m^2. That’s 1000m^2 of radiator per MW of datacenter, assuming you can operate with the radiator at 100°C. You can fudge this a bit with a heat pump (to run the radiator hotter, paying a linear-ish power penalty and gaining a…

  > Space (with a sunshade) is a nearly perfect medium into which to radiate heat, in the sense that there’s nothing better.
There is radiation but zero convection. As anyone with an oven or PC will tell you, even a very tiny fan makes a big difference in the ability to dump heat. We're not putting our PCs into vacuum chambers for a good reason. A small fan in your oven not only makes for more consistent heating in your food, but it requires less power

Re: Starcloud

#175

Post by echoangle »

jsheard wrote: post #149
slashdev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the other side of this is just buying Amazon stock based on the daring prediction that big grey buildings full of servers aren't going anywhere.

That still leaves you with the risk that Amazon is replaced by other earth-based data center operators.

Re: Starcloud

#177

Post by matt-p »

esperent wrote: post #127
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…

> There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem Nonetheless getting rid of heat (by radiation) is possible, otherwise people would be roasted inside the ISS. I'm sure all of these companies are advertising "ChatGPT in Space!" because that's what will generate hype and money, but what they'll actually be planning is very small edge data centers whose job is to reduce latency. Whethe…

Reduce latency for what? I can't think of how, unless of course you ran a laser down to starlink or some other completely impractical plan.

Re: Starcloud

#178

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

Is this an elaborate joke? I believe so given all the very real physical problems with this, but “GPT-6” training was what pushed it undoubtedly over the edge to pure joke.

Re: Starcloud

#179

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

"Space Theranos" wins the day for me. There really needs to be a better term than "stupid money" for investors who can be convinced with a slick presentation that by investing in a venture the principals will bring to market products that violate the laws of physics.

Re: Starcloud

#180

Post by matt-p »

trebligdivad wrote: post #171
lxgr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very small edge data centers whose job is to reduce latency Reduce latency to where?

Could this be a military image processing use? - imagining you're scooping up earth observation in real time, if you AI analysed it locally and then just sent a 'Missile at coordinate.....' and then just the image where you spotted it, it wouldn't be so much the latency as the bandwidth reduction.

But that's embedded compute on a satellite isn't it, not a data centre in space.
Post reply on HN