Replacing faulty nodes or equipment in space seems totally reasonable... It's not like getting faulty drives replaced in my datacenter racks don't already take weeks/months...
Starcloud
101–110 of 234 posts
Re: Starcloud
#102Altman: has stake in nuclear power and AI companies Also Altman: Let's build gigawatts of nuclear for AI Musk: has stake in space and AI companies Also Musk: Let's build AI datacenters in space
Starcloud is the concept I'll show my friends that datacenters have hit peak hype.
Can't wait for an alien to NIMBY one of these.
Re: Starcloud
#103Last 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…
Neal Stephenson's _Seveneves_ covers these dynamics in detail :)
Re: Starcloud
#104This cannot possibly end well (flipped bits, maintenance, cooling).
If they fulfill their promise within 10 years I'll change careers to kiwi farming. I promise.
Re: Starcloud
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
You'll get bitflips elsewhere besides just in RAM. A bitflip in L1 or L3 cache will be propagated to your DIMM and noone will be the wiser.
Re: Starcloud
#106They 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.
Once it’s easy enough to launch the hundreds of launches it would take to build one of these, it will also be trivial to launch a drone that can physically attach and attack them. This is the opposite of a secure facility.
Re: Starcloud
#107Apart from getting 16 sq. km of solar arrays and radiators into orbit - and without jumping to conclusions about whether this is a borderline scam - I can imagine 2 obvious showstoppers: 1) Space debris. This is proposal is several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest things in near-Earth orbits. Thus equally many orders more likely to be hit by, and create, space debris 2) Heat transport - this isn't my home…
LEO is the last place you should worry about space debris.
Space is just unfathomably large. If you aren’t in the same orbital plane, you’re just not going to have a problem. And if you did, Kessler syndrome in LEO is a non problem.
Could be an issue for specific orbital planes in stable orbits, but even there, it’s overblown.
Re: Starcloud
#108We'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…
Yeah, I just wanted to link to the same video.
By the way, the same channel also has a sobering video on commercial space stations. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2G60Y3ydtqY
Re: Starcloud
#109Earlier 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?
"Naughtiness," to use the technical term (https://paulgraham.com/founders.html).
Re: Starcloud
#110Last 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
Wouldn't a 16km² gigantic solar roof on Earth already cover the energy needs that they're pitching will be saved with this space data center?