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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

andrewmccalip.com

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Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#111

Post by ViscountPenguin »

hirsin wrote: post #110
d_silin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

specific software applications you can run in space that you can't run on Earth or can't run cheaper on Earth.

At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.

I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#112

Post by ViscountPenguin »

compiler-guy wrote: post #27
mlhpdx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unregulated casinos?

Unregulated casinos don't need this kind of compute. Most could be run on a decent raspberry pi or two. At any rate, one basic communication's satellite worth of compute would be more than enough. No need for TPUs.

A cube-sat casino is an interesting concept for sure.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#113

Post by klysm »

kragen wrote: post #85
zozbot234 wrote: post #19

Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…

At Satellogic, we famously flew mostly just regular cellphone parts on orbit. We did have higher rates of various kinds of failures than is usual on Earth, but hardware failure can generally be masked by software redundancy.

RAM corruption is not cheap to protect against

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#114

Post by modeless »

terminalshort wrote: post #76
jofer wrote: post #39

What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum. The artic…

But space isn't actually cold, or at least not space near Earth. It's about 10 C. And that's only about a 10 C less than room temperature, so a human habitable structure in near earth space won't radiate very much heat. But heat radiated is O(Tobject^4 - Tbackground^4), and a computer can operate up to around 90C (I think) so that is actually a very big difference here. Back of the envelope, a data center at 90C will…

The temperature that you raise to the fourth power is not Celsius, it's Kelvin. Otherwise things at -200 C would radiate more heat than things at 100 C. Also the temperature of space is ~3 K (cosmic microwave background), not 10 C.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#115

Post by hirsin »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #111
hirsin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.

I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.

Oh, fully agreed. Orbital datacenters don't solve many to any engineering problems either, so I figure its adherents are as much into legal problem solving as they are engineering problem solving.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#117

Post by enderfusion »

wmf wrote: post #38
zozbot234 wrote: post #19

Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

The radiation effects on the silicon solar cells is often underestimated, it's not just the GPUs!

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#118

Post by octaane »

The only benefit as I perceive it re: orbital data center hardware is regulatory avoidance. Think...DDOS machines that can't be shut off; or financial hosting services for unsavory individuals. However, it's very expensive by all metrics (including those talked about in the article), and frankly, these satellites are sitting ducks for the hunter killer satellites the various space powers have, if they actually wanted to do something about these hypothtical data centers and the problems they would cause.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#119

Post by [deleted] »

octaane wrote: post #118

The only benefit as I perceive it re: orbital data center hardware is regulatory avoidance. Think...DDOS machines that can't be shut off; or financial hosting services for unsavory individuals. However, it's very expensive by all metrics (including those talked about in the article), and frankly, these satellites are sitting ducks for the hunter killer satellites the various space powers have, if they actually wanted…

[deleted]

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#120

Post by Onavo »

klysm wrote: post #113
kragen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Satellogic, we famously flew mostly just regular cellphone parts on orbit. We did have higher rates of various kinds of failures than is usual on Earth, but hardware failure can generally be masked by software redundancy.

RAM corruption is not cheap to protect against

At today's prices perhaps, but pre ChatGPT you just have to run more of it + more error correction. Not great for the power budget but not anything significant in the grand scheme of things.
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