301–310 of 365 posts
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Because near all analysts have it on somewhere between a 5% and 7% CAGR.
That didn't answer the question but just repeat the original claim differently. Where are they getting those numbers?
> Data centres require tremendous amounts of energy
Set up a pollution tax on losers like coal, oil, methane, and let the market pick winners like solar, wind, nuclear
> A lot of waste heat is generated running TDCs, which contributes to climate change
Pollution tax would fix this
> Real estate for data centres is a massive bottleneck and this land could be used for other purposes
Not really. They're super high density. A land value tax would fix this.
People will really put computers in space before reading Henry George. What has this country come to?
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“just” It's theoretically possible for sure, but we've never done that in practice and it's far from trivial.
Yeah, “just.” Every child on a merry go round experiences it. Every car driving on a curve. And Gemini tested it once as well. It’s a basic feature of physics. Now why NASA hasn’t decided to implement it in decades is actually kind of a mystery.
> And Gemini tested it once as well.
From Wikipedia:
They were able to generate a small amount of artificial gravity, about 0.00015 g
So yes, you need an effect 60 000 times stronger than this.
And you want that to be relatively uniform over the size of an astronaut so you need a very big merry go round.
Nuclear fission is also a basic feature of physics, that doesn't mean engineering a nuclear power plant is straightforward.
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serious q: how much extra failure rate would you expect from the physical transition to space? on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration of the flight and loss of gravity...
I suspect the thermal system would look very different from a terrestrial component. Fans and connectors can shake loose - but do nothing in space. Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.
The Russians are the only ones who package their unmanned platform electronics in pressure vessels. Everyone else operates in vacuum, so no fans.
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serious q: how much extra failure rate would you expect from the physical transition to space? on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration of the flight and loss of gravity...
I suspect the thermal system would look very different from a terrestrial component. Fans and connectors can shake loose - but do nothing in space. Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.
sounds heavy
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Yeah, “just.” Every child on a merry go round experiences it. Every car driving on a curve. And Gemini tested it once as well. It’s a basic feature of physics. Now why NASA hasn’t decided to implement it in decades is actually kind of a mystery.
1g of acceleration is enormous compared to a child in a merry go round actually. > And Gemini tested it once as well. From Wikipedia: They were able to generate a small amount of artificial gravity, about 0.00015 g So yes, you need an effect 60 000 times stronger than this. And you want that to be relatively uniform over the size of an astronaut so you need a very big merry go round. Nuclear fission is also a basic f…
I wonder if there could be some way to photolitograph compute circuits directly onto a radiator substrate, and accomplish a fully-passive thermal solution that way. Consider the heat-conduction problem: from dimensional analysis, the required thickness of a (conduction-only) radiator plate with a regular grid of heat sources on it shrinks superlinearly as you subdivide those heat sources (from few large sources, into…
Look at the thermal shield design for the JWST. Could you have a data center that unfolds into a multi-layered plane where the outer solar collector layer faces the sun, an intermediate layer shields infrared emissions from the back side of that, and the final layer that always faces away from the sun holds (or is) a bunch of chips? Park it in an orbit where it can stay oriented this way or an L point. Free compute f…
Only a big power-efficient chip like M2 Ultra could survive if it could _only_ radiate from one side of the wafer into CMB.
The rest of the silicon will become molten at 100% TDP: H100, Xeon, Core, EPYC, Ryzen.
Most would be over 400C at 1% TDP.
Conduction and convection are linear or close and are effective at desirable temperatures, whereas thermal radiation is quartic and highly convex.
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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…
Same with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, inventing a detour because it sounds cool and ultimately don't work out because Occam's Razor.
Satellite data centers seem unlikely to me, but at least their feasibility doesn't require that existing stuff get more expensive/worse. Starcloud is a bet that three things will happen in the next decade:
- SpaceX Starship will succeed and drastically reduce launch costs.
- Batteries will not get 10x cheaper.
- There will be valuable applications for high latency, high performance compute (eg: AI training).
If any one of these things does not happen, Starcloud is doomed (or will have to pivot). If they all happen, Starcloud has a chance at success.
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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.