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Starcloud

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Starcloud

#51

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls »

stevage wrote: post #31
GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It says "Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length." So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.

I know. I'm saying what if you build lower density data centers that could be more passively cooled. Apparently being in space is no issue for latency, so I can't see why building it on earth in a remote-ish area would matter.

Re: Starcloud

#52

Post by notahacker »

Reubend wrote: post #3

Last 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…

You've also got the problem of cosmic radiation flipping bits. Your fault tolerant architecture probably mitigates this with redundancy, with the extra servers again eating into the purported advantages of extra solar power. Dealing with the PITA of single event upsets is something developers of edge data processing software in space put up with to avoid the latency issues that data clouds in space introduce

Re: Starcloud

#53

Post by Ekaros »

Actual engineering question. How large can you scale a cooling system in space? And I mean say from radial central point. Surely at some point it just doesn't work anymore. Or you spend more energy to get energy to point where you can radiate it away than you can radiate.

Re: Starcloud

#54

Post by 0xcb0 »

They state that in 10 years all data centers will be in outer space. I state that in 10 years we will look back and think this was a ridiculous idea. The meta and maintenance costs, the pollution of sending them to space, the space pollution itself, the outer space radiation, the extra redundant error correction needed*,* and much more all speak against this. Why not throw that trillion dollars into optical computing chip research? Why not create better sustainable methods here on earth*?* We could run a single data center down here, or pay a million times moreto do this in space. The argument that we are polluting Earth down here is very weak. Yes, we do, but why on earth do we then not invest more in research for solving these problems*?* There are startups out there that will one day solve these issues. And then space data centers will be something for the Star Trek age, which humanity will probably never achieve.

Re: Starcloud

#55

Post by throwanem »

api wrote: post #12
Reubend wrote: post #3

Last 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…

Your memory serves well with respect to the Shuttle. Astronaut Mike Mullane, from his autobiography Riding Rockets:

> Next [after loading the computers with on-orbit software] we opened the payload bay doors. The inside of those doors contained radiators used to dump the heat generated by our electronics into space. If they failed to open, we’d have only a couple hours to get Discovery back on Earth before she fried her brains. But both doors swung open as planned, another milestone passed.

Re: Starcloud

#56

Post by ben_w »

wiz21c wrote: post #2

I 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 ?

Lots of things limit the benefit of putting PV in space. UV damages the semiconductors faster, ditto micrometeoroids, it's just plain expensive to put stuff up there in the first place…

It's not a slam-dunk "no", we are seeing developments on all metrics. It's just that right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the claim of x10 improvement was anywhere from correct to x100 over-optimistic.

Re: Starcloud

#57

Post by danielbln »

bpicolo wrote: post #40

> In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space,” Johnston predicts. Can I bet on the contrary odds? Could throw down my whole retirement with confidence

Yeah, who throws out these sort of timeframe in earnest? We haven't built anything in space since the ISS (which is in LEO mind you, not "outer space"), and we're building full data centers within a decade? Give me a break, that's an Elon level prediction.

Re: Starcloud

#58

Post by perihelions »

blourvim wrote: post #17

So 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 unpatchab…

> "the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator"

I believe it's on the order of magnitude of 100x return (for a low-orbit space photovoltiac panel that's (almost) always facing direct sun).

    (/ (* ([W (kg -1)] 200)   ;; reasonable space PV power/mass ratio
          ([year] 10)         ;; guess at lifespan
          ([ton] 100))        ;; Starship payload
       (* ([ton] 1000)        ;; tons of liquid methane in Starsihp
          ([J (kg -1)] 5e7))) ;; specific energy density of CH₄
    
    ;; => 126.226944

Re: Starcloud

#59

Post by ben_w »

non- wrote: post #24
jiggawatts wrote: post #15

This 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.

Round-trip to GEO will add 238.7 milliseconds to whatever other infra you have over the last 200 km vertically* and whatever along the ground. It's probably fine for some things, but not for everything.

* while there could, in principle, be no extra infra in the last 200 km vertically, that means someone on the ground is talking directly to GEO. As per similar discussion about big PV space stations beaming power to the ground, your minimum ground spot size for a transmitter this big and this far away is still tens of km, which limits the other parts of your overall system design.

Re: Starcloud

#60

Post by nine_k »

0xcb0 wrote: post #54

They state that in 10 years all data centers will be in outer space. I state that in 10 years we will look back and think this was a ridiculous idea. The meta and maintenance costs, the pollution of sending them to space, the space pollution itself, the outer space radiation, the extra redundant error correction needed*,* and much more all speak against this. Why not throw that trillion dollars into optical computing…

I think the bigger thing about a space-based data center that it's not on anyone's land, and not easy to inspect or capture.

Solar energy available around the clock allows it to be self-sufficient for a long time.

I suppose there will be some demand for high-security, high-price setups like that.

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