So many questions to be asked, I don't know where to start. What's the upside of bunching up all the servers into a single megastructure rather than separate satellites?
Starcloud
21–30 of 234 posts
Re: Starcloud
#22Last 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…
Given the water needs of data centers and the ongoing and upcoming water scarcity, I imagine the problem of heat dissipation seems easier to solve, long term, in space.
Re: Starcloud
#23Last 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
There's already about 0.4 square km of solar panels across the Starlink constellation. (~4,000 v2 satellites at ~100 meter^2 each).
Re: Starcloud
#24This 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…
Nothing stopping the satellite data center from communicating back to homebase via Starlink network right?
Would probably need to negotiate for a huge amount of dedicated priority bandwidth, but latency shouldn't actually be that bad.
Re: Starcloud
#25The prelude of a Dyson Sphere!
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Re: Starcloud
#26It’s more of a building the solution first and then look for the problem because why the heck not.
Re: Starcloud
#27> Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length.
That is...very, very large.
Re: Starcloud
#28We've officially lost the plot, we will now ship our AI data centers to ~space~ ... This will not work with modern technology.
The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day, requiring you to either shift all workloads or add substantial UPS weight. The radiator grid you need to cool 125kw is something like 16x the size of the entire data center.
I watched this video last week that went into 3 different scenarios, it's a good watch.
Re: Starcloud
#29One of the selling points they mention is that they won't need to use any fresh water for cooling.
My understanding was that water-demands on Earth were an overblown issue and minuscule when compared to other uses of fresh water such as watering one acre of farmland.
Not to mention, "used" water is just "warm" water that can then be used again for other purposes.
So are they perpetuating a myth here? Or is water use a bigger issue than I thought?
Re: Starcloud
#30Last 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…
Given the water needs of data centers and the ongoing and upcoming water scarcity, I imagine the problem of heat dissipation seems easier to solve, long term, in space.
We can and do build data centres that don't use evaporative cooling, evaporation is just often the cheapest option in places with large natural water sources.