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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#181

Post by xnx »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #125
transpute wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Their whitepaper clearly demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge of thermal engineering. E.g. heat pumps are described as magical things. They are literally planning to feed the radiators using a coolant like water and sensible heat at 35 degC to 5 degC. At 5 GW, you then need to be pumping 60 000 liters of water per second. That's like a tenth of the Sacramento river, going through a 16 sq km array in space and ho…

> 60 000 liters of water per second

Then they just need to worry about the extra friction heat generated by moving that much liquid.

Re: Starcloud

#182

Post by lxgr »

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.

In-orbital-plane data processing is an interesting idea! Laser links are much simpler to do between satellites in the same plane than across planes or even down to Earth.

Re: Starcloud

#183

Post by matt-p »

echoangle wrote: post #173
amelius wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if the cooling system was free p&p will be $7 million.

Re: Starcloud

#184

Post by ceejayoz »

ziofill wrote: post #78
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…

Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the only energy they get is coming from the sun, then they only need to dissipate that same amount of heat (minus whatever energy was needed for beaming data down to Earth).

The wrinkle is that taking it in is much, much easier than radiating it back into space.

Re: Starcloud

#186

Post by rjbwork »

debatem1 wrote: post #131
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?

If you figure out how to do this I will invest in your fund.

Gotta figure out how to sell these guys shovels

Re: Starcloud

#187

Post by CobrastanJorji »

slashdev wrote: post #112
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?

You know, that's a fascinating idea. Most startups fail, a few modestly succeed, but the unicorns are so profitable that they mostly make up for the rest. That reminds me of two fields: insurance and gambling.

Venture Capitalists are already like reverse insurance companies. They cover lots of people in the hopes that one of them will hit a rare event and it'll pay for the others.

Buying shares of a single startup is sort of the equivalent of betting on a specific horse to win a race. But what's the equivalent of lay betting (betting that a specific horse will NOT win)? Shorting? But you can't short a private company.

But wait, venture capitalists are already betting that their startups will make money. What if they were willing to double down a bit and accept lay bets? Say there was a kind of specialized short agreement that let you say "here is $x, if in N years company Y has less than $z profit/revenue, I get K*$x. Otherwise, VC gets to keep my $x." You could sell it to VCs as a way to do options trading on their own startup investments, plus it'd be a good way to get the wisdom of the crowds or whatever.

Re: Starcloud

#188

Post by ceejayoz »

GolfPopper wrote: post #147

The use-case for this is not anything technical, it's putting your data center outside of any jurisdiction.

The Sealand folks found rapidly that “outside any jurisdiction” also means “not protected by one”.

Re: Starcloud

#189

Post by aylmao »

entangledqubit wrote: post #81

Microsoft had/has the Natick project which was an undersea data center testbed which allegedly had a bunch of benefits. That doesn't seem to have gone anywhere - or at least isn't really scaling up. I'd imagine the ongoing operational costs of space are worse than the ocean? To me, the cost estimates seem a bit off and conflate capital with running costs. The main benefit for space at the moment seems to be sidestepp…

> Microsoft had/has the Natick project which was an undersea data center testbed which allegedly had a bunch of benefits. That doesn't seem to have gone anywhere - or at least isn't really scaling up.

I think at the core of this there's a risk analysis. At one point I briefly worked in a team in charge of a company's servers, and there were plenty of stories of things gone wrong enough that someone had to drive or fly to the datacenter. These company's datacenters were named after the closest airport for this reason, iirc. A little optimization in case things went very wrong; you always knew where you'd have to fly in to.

Even if an undersea data center could potentially yield cost benefits, it's also significantly riskier in case something goes wrong. How long would it take to physically access a machine? Do you have to bring down other machines to access it? And at scale, things tend to always go wrong.

To comment on the original post, needless to say this is even more complicated, costly and untimely in space.

Re: Starcloud

#190

Post by cogogo »

> able to train large models like GPT6

That is pretty amazing to say with a straight face. Whatever GPT6 may or may not ever be…

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