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Starcloud

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Starcloud

#81

Post by Gravityloss »

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…

By my back of the envelope calculations, the radiators would be comparable to the solar arrays, probably somewhat smaller and not massively bigger at least.

Re: Starcloud

#82

Post by LunaSea »

perihelions wrote: post #23
petesergeant wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This project seems 40x larger than all of Starlink's constellation combined. So quite huge.

Re: Starcloud

#83

Post by westurner »

Would it be more cost effective and more sustainable to heavily invest in graphene semiconductors than space-based datacenters? Is that a false dilemma?

Aren't there advantages to fabricating GO Graphene Oxide and CNT Carbon Nanotubes in microgravity?

Re: Starcloud

#84

Post by LunaSea »

nine_k wrote: post #60
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.

Either the satellite is geostationary and doesn't have 24h / 24h sun exposure as energy source.

Or they are not geostationary but it also means the datacenter will connect to a different earth base station which means the data access route would change and latency would increase which would be unacceptable for a lot of use cases.

You would then need to replicate and synchronise customer data across the different space data centres to make it possible to access said data in constant and low-latency time.

Re: Starcloud

#85

Post by spockz »

notahacker wrote: post #61
GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can think of some parts of earth where passive cooling isn't a major problem, and some of them even have power sources...

Should we be adding massive sources of heat (datacenters) to regions that can easily passively cool them? It sounds like that would be somewhere around the Arctics. These are already seeing record high temperatures both in winter and summer. Maybe if we manage to radiate all the heat directly back into space by mimicking snow…?

Re: Starcloud

#86

Post by amelius »

Gravityloss wrote: post #81
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…

By my back of the envelope calculations, the radiators would be comparable to the solar arrays, probably somewhat smaller and not massively bigger at least.

Care to share them?

Re: Starcloud

#87

Post by robertclaus »

You'll never be able to do maintenance or upgrade these things. The up front cost seems extremely high given the risk of hardware failure or obselecence at data center scales.

Re: Starcloud

#88

Post by esafak »

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…

Why can't it be geostationary? Laser communication can get you gigabit speeds today. That would take a month to transmit GPT-5's estimated 280TB training corpus, which is acceptable. Latency does not matter.

Re: Starcloud

#89

Post by andsoitis »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #71
teekert wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Space is empty.

This prompted my curiosity. None of the following contradicts the thrust of your message, but I thought the nuance is interesting to share.

Interstellar space isn't a vacuum. Space is mostly empty compared to Earthly standards, but it still contains gas (mostly hydrogen and helium), dust, radiation, magnetic fields, and quantum activity.

The emptiest regions are incredibly sparse, but not completely empty. Even in a perfect vacuum, quantum mechanics predicst that particle-antiparticle pairs constantly pop in and out of existence, so empty space can be said to be buzzing with tiny fluctuations.

> Space is not cold. It has no real value for temperature. Stuff in space does.

The cosmic microwave background radiation, the left-over energy from the Big Bang, sets a baseline temperature of about 2.7K (-270°C), just above absolute zero.

Temperature depends on particle collisions, and since space isn't a vacuum, just incredibly sparse, one can talk about the temperature of space, but you're right that what is typically more relevant is the temperature of "specific" objects.

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