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Datacenters in space aren't going to work

taranis.ie

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Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#141

Post by foobarian »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #89
foobarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"

Breakeven in X years probably makes sense for storage (slow depreciation), not GPUs (depreciates in like 4 years)

I think by far the most mass in this kind of setup would go into the heat management, which could probably last a long time and could be amortized separately from the electronics.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#142

Post by MadnessASAP »

jcranmer wrote: post #109
foobarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"

Strictly speaking, the thermosphere is actually much warmer than the atmosphere we experience--on the order of 100's or even a 1000 degrees Celsius, if you're measuring by temperature (the average kinetic energy of molecules). However, since particle density is so low, the number of molecules is quite low, and so total heat content of the thermosphere is low. But since particle count is low, conduction and convection…

Technically radiation cooling is 100% efficient. And remarkably effective, you can cool an inert object to the temperature of the CMBR (4K) without doing anything at all. However it is rather slow and works best if there's no nearby planets or stars.

Fun fact though, make your radiator hotter and you can dump just as much if not more energy then you would typically via convective cooling. At 1400C (just below the melting point of steel) you can shed 450kW of heat per square meter, all you need is a really fancy heat pump!

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#143

Post by XorNot »

teeray wrote: post #110
marcellus23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes an orbital facility at less risk of getting bombed?

Probably needs more delta-v to match orbit than a suborbital ICBM would. Not less risk—just more expensive. Depends how valuable the target is.

Except you don't. You only need to match velocities if you want to dock with something.

Hitting something in orbit just requires you to be in the way at the right time.

Basically an intercept is a lot easier.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#144

Post by Spooky23 »

mbesto wrote: post #120

Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power. Follow the rationale: 1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three…

Data centers in space is about leading investors to circumvent their brains and jump on the hype train at worst, and developing technology around data center infrastructure at best.

Microsoft did something similar with their submarine data center pilots. This gets more press because AI.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#146

Post by foobarian »

noselasd wrote: post #106
foobarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"

Is it an advantage though ? One of the main objections in the article is exactly that. There's no atmosphere that helps with heat loss through convection, there's nowhere to shed heat through conduction, all you have is radiation. It is a serious engineering challenge for spacecrafts to getting rid of the little heat they generate, and avoid being overheated by the sun.

I think it is an advantage, the question is just how big, and assume we look only at ongoing operation cost.

- Earth temperatures are variable, and radiation only works at night

- The required radiator area is much smaller for the space installation

- The engineering is simple: CPU -> cooler -> liquid -> pipe -> radiator. We're assuming no constraint on capex so we can omit heat pumps

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#147

Post by Spooky23 »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #128
vintermann wrote: post #39

Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion thems…

The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb

Who knows what tech is in space already. Maybe an “AI data center in space” would be the equivalent of a flock camera for an entire region.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#148

Post by ikiris »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #132
mbesto wrote: post #120

Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power. Follow the rationale: 1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three…

Nation states can fire missiles at your space datacenter, bruh.

Or just blast it with a laser...

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#149

Post by hedora »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #132
mbesto wrote: post #120

Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power. Follow the rationale: 1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three…

Nation states can fire missiles at your space datacenter, bruh.

Or just triangulate any signals being sent to it, and fire missiles at the source.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#150

Post by hedora »

titzer wrote: post #138

In addition to the ludicrous unworkable physics, as it turns out, datacenters need people servicing things all the time . Even if you could get those measly three racks into space, they'd function about a month before some harddisks were failing, network switches were down, some crap breaks in the cooling system, power system short, breakers trip, etc, and on and on. So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into…

Nah; let it fail in place.

See also: Any on-prem horror show that budgeted for capex, rent, cooling, network and power, but not maintenance.

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