> There, 24/7 solar power is unhindered by day/night cycles, weather, and atmospheric losses (attenuation).
Wouldn’t the earth still get in the way of the sun or it’s too far away?
Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
251–260 of 365 posts
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#252Space 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've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon. Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect lo…
I'd naively assume that the stress of launch (vibration, G-forces) would trigger failures in hardware that had been working on the ground. So I'd expect to see a large-ish number of failures on initial bringup in space.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon. Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect lo…
I'd naively assume that the stress of launch (vibration, G-forces) would trigger failures in hardware that had been working on the ground. So I'd expect to see a large-ish number of failures on initial bringup in space.
Electronics can be extremely resilient to vibration and g forces. Self guided artillery shells such as the M982 Excalibur include fairly normal electronics for GPS guidance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal…
While that's all true, it does hilariously increase the difficulty for the government showing up and seizing your server hardware...
ASAT missiles have existed since the 80s and multiple countries have demonstrated the capability to destroy something in space.
Meanwhile, you, the actual human being the government wants to coerce, are still on the earth, where someone can grab you and beat you with a wrench
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#255Space 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…
[deleted]
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
ECC everything?
Isn't ECC only applied to RAM? Do any current gen CPUs have ECC cache?
I can't comment on AMD or Intel but Apple Silicon definitely uses ECC for at least the system level cache. On top of that it performs cache healing (swapping out bad lines for spares) on every cache level every time the system boots.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#257I’m mostly puzzled by how this got yc funding. Everything I’ve seen thus far suggests this is nowhere close to feasible
But but but they release a "whitepaper"! Surely that's worth at least ten million dollars!
BRB, buying a copy of Microsoft Word so I can retire.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonder if you could game that in theory by burning in the components on the surface before launch or if the launch would cause a big enough spike from the vibration damage that it's not worth it.
I suspect you'd absolutely want to burn in before launch, maybe even including simulating some mechanical stress to "shake out" more issues, but it is a valid question how much burn in is worth doing before and after launch.
Vibration testing is a completely standard part of space payload pre-flight testing. You would absolutely want to vibe-test (no, not that kind) at both a component level and fully integrated before launch.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon. Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect lo…
I'd naively assume that the stress of launch (vibration, G-forces) would trigger failures in hardware that had been working on the ground. So I'd expect to see a large-ish number of failures on initial bringup in space.
On the ground vibration testing is a standard part of pre-launch spacecraft testing. This would trigger most (not all) vibration/G-force related failures on the ground rather than at the actual launch.
Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've talked to the founder of Starcloud about this, there is just going to be a lot of data generative stuff in space in the future, and further and further out into space. He thinks now is the right time to learn how to compute up there because people will want to process, and maybe orchestrate processing between many devices, in space. He's fully aware of all of the objections in this hn comments section, he just d…
Seems far more likely that the "data generative stuff" will get smaller and cheaper to run (like cell phones with on-device models) much faster than "run a giant supercomputer in orbit" will become easy.
My headlights aren't good enough so I'm unsure but generally that maps. To me the interoperability part is what is interesting, your data and my data in real time being consumed by some understanding agent doing automated research? I could imagine putting something like a Stoffel MPC layer in there, then nations states can more easily work together? I presume space data/research will be highly competitive, even friendly nations may want to combine data without knowing the underneath. We're so far out here that it's kinda silly, but I don't think we're out to lunch? Have a great weekend Chris! :)