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Starcloud

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Starcloud

#71

Post by philipwhiuk »

teekert wrote: post #69
drcongo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned something interesting here, thanks. I've never really thought about it so I'd always assumed space = cold so that would be fine.

Space is cold. There are just very little cold molecules to take over the energy from your hot molecules. Here on earth we are surrounded by many molecules, that are not so cold, but colder than us and together they can take a lot of our excess heat energy away.

Space is not cold. Space is empty. It has no real value for temperature.

Stuff in space does.

Re: Starcloud

#72

Post by righthand »

Oras wrote: post #67
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

I read it as something an ambitious founder would say, not to be taken literally. Think: "AI will replace all software developers in 6 months"

This used to be called fraud, now it’s cutesy lying?

Re: Starcloud

#73

Post by philipwhiuk »

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…

> Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.

I imagine it's the same reason James Cameron is a world expert on submersibles - the guy picks individual topics in his movies to really get right.

Re: Starcloud

#74

Post by philipwhiuk »

righthand wrote: post #72
Oras wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as something an ambitious founder would say, not to be taken literally. Think: "AI will replace all software developers in 6 months"

This used to be called fraud, now it’s cutesy lying?

I think now it's called 'the pitch deck'

Re: Starcloud

#75

Post by gtsnexp »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #70
gtsnexp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their white paper touches on the issue, which seems slightly hand-wavy without much detail on quantification. They could potentially take advantage of heat gradients from deep space and dissipate heat to explore the Seeback effect.

Deep space? So they want to be outside geostationary orbit?

p3 of their white paper https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf akshually...

Re: Starcloud

#76

Post by heeton »

rolisz wrote: post #46
api wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Mass Effect video games talk about cooling ships, with the warships glowing red from heat if they go too fast

I enjoyed seeing it described in those games :)

I'm pretty sure it was that series that also described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator , with the side effects of different ships having very distinct heat patterns because of their radiator patterns. And that if a ship ever had to make a turn while they were active, big glowing arcs of slowly-cooling droplets would be flung out into space and leave a kind of heat plume.

Re: Starcloud

#77

Post by thinkingtoilet »

non- wrote: post #29

One 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…

Well, for one thing you can't eat GPUs, so I'm ok with farmland taking up more water.

Also, the "warm" water has already destroyed ecosystems because the data centers are just dumping it. It's a completely solvable issue if we had any common sense regulations.

Re: Starcloud

#78

Post by preisschild »

notahacker wrote: post #52
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

I wonder if "normal" RDIMM ECC would be enough to mitigate most of those radiation bit-flipping issues. If so it wouldn't really make a difference to earth-based servers since most enterprise servers use RDIMM ECC too

Re: Starcloud

#79

Post by mr_toad »

bearjaws wrote: post #28

We'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 scenari…

> The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day

Depends on the orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_angle

Re: Starcloud

#80

Post by preisschild »

righthand wrote: post #72
Oras wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as something an ambitious founder would say, not to be taken literally. Think: "AI will replace all software developers in 6 months"

This used to be called fraud, now it’s cutesy lying?

Musk has been doing it for more than a decade now and didnt really face any real problems doing it...
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