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Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

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Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#101

Post by jand »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #68
ggreer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the Starcloud whitepaper[1], it claims that massive batteries aren't needed because the satellites would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. Except for occasional lunar eclipses, the solar panels would be in constant sunlight. The whitepaper also says that they're targeting use cases that don't require low latency or high availability. In short: AI model training and other big offline tasks. F…

You can also drink from a shoe. It's absolutely possible.

And it enjoyed some popularity. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_boot

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#102

Post by __m »

trhway wrote: post #37

My napkin is with Starcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43190778 , ie. one Starship $10M launch - 10 000 GPU datacenter into LEO with energy and cooling. I missed there batteries for the half the time being in the Earth shadow (as originally i calculated that for crypto where you can have half the time off which isn't the case for the regular datacenter) and panels to charge them, that adds 10kg for 1 KWH, a…

$10M is at best SpaceX's projected internal cost.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#103

Post by semi-extrinsic »

Robotbeat wrote: post #95
throwawaymaths wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there literally is nothing to absorb the heat. Conduction and convection are out, all you got is radiation. new vc rule: no investing in space startups unless their founders have 1000 hours in KSP and 500 hours in children of a dead earth

Radiation is not actually a problem unless you're trying to do super high power nuclear electric propulsion (i.e. in your videogame). Classic armchair engineer mistake, tbh. Radiators work great in space. Stefan-Boltzmann's law. The ISS's solar panels are MUCH smaller than the radiators. Considering datacenters on Earth have to have massive heat exchangers as well, I really think the bUt wHaT aBoUt rAdiAtOrs is an ov…

The problem is not that radiators don't work. The problem is the need for liquid cooling. The heat prduced per area in the GPU/CPU is much bigger than the cooling capacity per area of your radiator.

Even here on earth, contemporary GPU racks for AI have had to move to liquid cooling because it is the only way to extract enough heat. At 120 kW for 18x 1U servers (GB200 NVL72), the power density is waaay beyond what you can do with air even.

The last time Starcloud was doing the rounds on HN, I estimated that they need to be pumping water at a flow rate of 60 000 liters per second, if you use the numbers in their whitepaper. That's a tenth of the Sacramento river, flowing in space through a network with a million junctions and hoping nothing leaks.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#104

Post by NitpickLawyer »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

Appreciate the insights, but I think failing hardware is the least of their problems. In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected (nitrogen atmosphere could be a key factor there).

> The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It equates to a 0.7% loss in the sea versus 5.9% on land.

6/855 servers over 6 years is nothing. You'd simply re-launch the whole thing in 6 years (with advances in hardware anyways) and you'd call it a day. Just route around the bad servers. Add a bit more redundancy in your scheme. Plan for 10% to fail.

That being said, it's a complete bonkers proposal until they figure out the big problems, like cooling, power, and so on.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#105

Post by wmf »

oceanplexian wrote: post #83
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

Why does it need to be robots? On Earth we have skeleton crews maintain large datacenters. If the cost of mass to orbit is 100x cheaper, it’s not that absurd to have an on-call rotation of humans to maintain the space datacenter and install parts shipped on space FedEx or whatever we have in the future.

Yeah, just attach a Haven module to the data center.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#106

Post by philosophty »

"Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time."

This premise is basically false. Most datacenter hardware, once it has completed testing and burn in, will last for years in constant use.

There are definitely failures but they're very low unless something is wrong like bad cooling, vibration, or just a bad batch of hardware.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#107

Post by mulmen »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #70
mulmen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you need an enormous amount of energy to run the servers. You may hide the downlinks but you still need power.

I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations while providing a commercial service that justifies many $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch permission.

Yeah exactly. We’re riffing on how implausible that is, right?

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#108

Post by Nevermark »

weq wrote: post #100
Robotbeat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to air travel (both air freight and passenger travel). (Especially irritating is the continued assertion that thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a radi…

Musk is already in the testing phase for this. His starship rockets should be reusable as soon as 2018!

And in the meantime, he has responsibly redistributed and recycled their mass. Avoiding any concern that Earth's mass could be negatively impacted.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#109

Post by [deleted] »

Robotbeat wrote: post #96
hamburglar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems prudent to achieve fully robotic datacenters on earth before doing it in space. I know, I’m a real wet blanket.

If mass is going to be as cheap as is needed for this to work anyway, there's no reason you can't just use people like in a normal datacenter.

[deleted]

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#110

Post by closewith »

monster_truck wrote: post #84
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

I suspect they'd stop at automatic rendezvous & docking. Use some sort of cradle system that holds heat fins, power, etc that boxes of racks would slot into. Once they fail just pop em out and let em burn up. Someone else will figure out the landing bit I won't say it's a good idea, but it's a fun way to get rid of e-waste (I envision this as a sort of old persons home for parted out supercomptuers)

Spreading heavy metals in the upper atmosphere. Fun.
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