Make something hard harder, just because
It'll provide Earth more shade from that pesky sun!
They’re really proposing it as an oblique solution to climate change
Starcloud
221–230 of 325 posts
Re: Starcloud
#222I’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?
I've been saying this as a joke for a while (IMHO I think Perplexity is a scam).
I really wish there was a secondary for private equity.
Re: Starcloud
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have continuous sunlight, can't you get away with no battery? Not arguing with your overall point - this company looks ridiculous.
For continuous you need to either go for a polar orbit or go very far in space. Most launch centers & providers are not well situation for polar orbits because its not a common use case, so you need to sacrifice launch mass. The same goes for far away orbits - you need to sacrifice launch mass to go further. Also if you are far then you get latency issues. So it skews the economics pretty harshly. I think OP is right…
I think the proposal suggested an orbit where the solar panels are always in sun and always properly aligned and always clean due to space gophers.
But more seriously, GPU loads are super spiky. Ground-based power grids and generators and batteries have trouble keeping up with them. You can go from 1MW idle to 50MW full power in 10ms. Unbuffered solar cells are right out.
Re: Starcloud
#224I’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 obv. can't cause that would be a considerably easier and hence not a payoff worthy bet than the inverse of picking winners from an aspiring group of people trying to do something new in the world.
For all the financial inefficiencies of that - objectively - we get to benefit as humanity from the (expensive) mistakes of others.
So here's to whatever this is leading to much better insights about computing in space at best!
Re: Starcloud
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're missing is that you'd have a huge solar array that powers something much smaller, so that energy gets concentrated into a small area.
That’s not how it works. With conservation of energy, all the energy coming in to power the computers has to be emitted somehow. Powering computers doesn’t get rid of the energy, it just makes it unusable and converts it into heat.
This is probably a stupid question but is it possible to recycle the heat back into electricity and use it again?
Re: Starcloud
#226I'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…
> So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load…
Starcloud’s whitepaper suggests a 4 km × 4 km radiator. For comparison, the James Web Space Telescope has a sunshield measuring 21 m × 14 m and the International Space Station measures 109 m × 73 m.
Re: Starcloud
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're missing is that you'd have a huge solar array that powers something much smaller, so that energy gets concentrated into a small area.
That’s not how it works. With conservation of energy, all the energy coming in to power the computers has to be emitted somehow. Powering computers doesn’t get rid of the energy, it just makes it unusable and converts it into heat.
Right and that's why the heat is the problem, in space.
But if the collected heat comes from a large area of solar-cells, and is then focused on the small area of a computer or graphics-card, that computer might melt.
Re: Starcloud
#228Simply tow the data center out of the environment![1]
Re: Starcloud
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> power is continuous and free via solar array It’s is on earth as well using solar and batteries. What is likely to get cheaper faster? Solar and batteries? Or lifting datacenters to space? The world is almost at the point of deploying 1TW/year of solar, and batteries are catching up. No space required. There aren't a lot of VC investment opportunities speeding the rate of solar and battery deployments though.
The argument probably is that battery advances require not yet existing tech via new chemistry etc while what they are proposing is basically just integrating tech that already exists
But this is not the case, as it relates to the battery manufacturing pipeline and capacity. Battery supply exceeds battery demand.
Re: Starcloud
#230I'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…
Heat pumps could dramatically impact performance by increasing the temperature of the radiators. The hotter they are, the more power they can dissipate per unit time & area.
Doubling the radiator temperature would give you 16x more radiated power.