The prelude of a Dyson Sphere!
Starcloud
11–20 of 234 posts
Re: Starcloud
#12Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost s…
This is a big thing never shown in sci-fi. For example, those huge torch ships in The Expanse would need gigantic radiators. Even if the drive were upwards of 90% efficient the waste heat would melt the engine and the rest of the ship.
Even the ISS has sizable radiators. The Shuttle had deployable radiators in the form of the bay doors if my memory serves me correctly.
Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.
There’s no air resistance in space so radiators don’t impact your flight characteristics.
Re: Starcloud
#13Would this not only work if there are solar arrays always catching the sun while the gpus are never in the sun?
Re: Starcloud
#14It really feels like I'm living in the future, lately.
Re: Starcloud
#15This is absolute nonsense.
The first thing to consider is that this thing won’t be stationary!
Geosynchronous orbit is much more expensive to reach per kg launched, even for Starship… when it starts working properly.
Lower orbits… aren’t stationary. Who wants a data centre that’s “over the horizon” from the owning country most of the time!?
If you think AWS egress costs are bad? Just add some zeroes! No, more zeroes than that…
Re: Starcloud
#16What a scam
Re: Starcloud
#17So many questions, like how would you protect from bit flips, damage to circuits.
"10x lower energy costs and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth." I am not sure if we need a rocket scientist to calculate the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator and just letting it run.
What happens when the servers need to retire due to some unpatchable bug
Re: Starcloud
#18Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost s…
Their website pitches it as 16 square km
Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field.
Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.
Re: Starcloud
#19They really don't want to let this bubble pop, do they?
This is a con artist smelling “idiots with too much money and nowhere else to spend it.”
They’re the same sort as the cold fusion people coming out of the woodwork with “investment opportunities” during the peak of ZIRP.
Re: Starcloud
#20I though that refrigerating things in space was using a lot of energy because heat cannot dissipate in the void of space. Moreover, why are the energy cost 10x lower when in space you have unlimited access to sun power? Is it the cost of building the energy production infrastructure ?
The whole thing is bogus, you could plop the hardware in the middle of a desert and have everything perform way better for cheaper.
I'm surprised nvidia put their name on this.