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Starcloud

blogs.nvidia.com

191–200 of 234 posts

Re: Starcloud

#191
post #180
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even beyond cooling, just getting all the hardware up there is extremely costly, and for what benefit over ground based DCs? The cooling is the ongoing problem but the cost of lifting it there obliterates all the other problems, IMO.

And who is The Law, in space? What's to prevent E.G. Amazon Kuiper or Musk Starlink from crashing one of their vehicles into the array, when they want to takeover their market?

My understanding is that the normal rule here is that the launching state has jurisdiction over (and international legal responsibility for) what is done by a spacecraft, but I’d bet that if private parties crashing their spacecraft into those of other private parties with widespread, economically significant use became a thing, a whole lot of countries in which one or more of the companies have assets or interests would discover jurisdiction in underused provisions of their domestic law rather quickly, no matter where either of the craft involved were launched.

Re: Starcloud

#192
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…

TFA> “In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy,”

Why is this exclusive to space? If you're powering datacenters on solar, one would think covering the Sahara or other large desert in datacenters would be easier than launching them into space. Renewable energy is just as plentiful and free there, you can connect it to the rest of the world with multiple TB/s of fiber links, and the construction/maintainence costs would be a few orders of magnitude less.

Re: Starcloud

#193
I'm by no means closer or educated enough on astrophysics or anything to do with space. Hence I have a very "commoner" question:

- asteroids? Debris? It's there even any risk of anything significantly big to be damaged by something flying by?

"About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface."

I assume a good old "Prius" might have opinions about such construction of it flies through it.

But I guess "space is big", risks are low?

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...

Re: Starcloud

#194
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…

Whats going to be delivered first - Tesla FSD or a space based data center?

Re: Starcloud

#196
post #193

I'm by no means closer or educated enough on astrophysics or anything to do with space. Hence I have a very "commoner" question: - asteroids? Debris? It's there even any risk of anything significantly big to be damaged by something flying by? "About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface." I assume a good old "Prius"…

The solar array is 4 km by 4 km. The whole Earth, with its 6400 km radius, only gets hit by a Prius-sized asteroid once per year. So the risks are much lower. I guess the array may be hit by many micro-asteroids though, but it should be possible to engineer some level of tolerance for that.

Re: Starcloud

#197

Their numbers strike me as very optimistic: *Table 1. Cost comparison of a single 40 MW cluster operated for 10 years in space vs on land.* | Cost Item | Terrestrial | Space |:------------------------------|:--------------------------------|:---------------- | Energy (10 years) | $140m @ $0.04 per kWh | $2m cost of solar array | Launch | None | $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators) | Cooling (chill…

> $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators)

This seems absurdly low to me.

Re: Starcloud

#199
post #129
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends where they get the water. If they're pumping an aquifer fry and doing evaporative cooling they could be just boiling an entire areas water source. If they could figure out how to use salt water it'd be ideal.

Just run your closed loop cooling through a heat exchanger in sea water. They probably do something like this already.

Yes, pouring more heat into the already warming oceans is surely a safe plan.

Re: Starcloud

#200
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share them?

Extremely rough one significant digit analysis from first principles, containing a lot of assumptions: For solar panels: Assuming area of 1000 square meters (30m x 30m square), solar irradiance of 1 kW/m^2, efficiency of 0.2. As a result power is 200 kW. For radiators: Stefan-Boltzmann constant 6E-8, temperature difference of 300 K, emissivity of one, we get total radiator power 1000 x 6E-8 x 300^4 = 486 kW. The radi…

There's a very clever scheme I remember reading about a while ago where you dump the heat into an oil that you then spray in a fine mist towards a collector. You get a collosal surface area that way, in a very confined volume, with not that much more mass than a coolant fluid which you already need; and it's relatively easy to homogenise the temperature across the radiating particles. I seem to recall that it got as far as Dupont coming up with a specific coolant mix for the job; the rest of the system is a relatively well-understood (if precise) nozzle/collector design so you don't end up squirting your coolant off somewhere you can't catch it.
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