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Datacenters in space aren't going to work

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Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#151

Post by ikiris »

marcellus23 wrote: post #86
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…

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

Because its stupid, not that its hard.

You want to push things out of orbit not turn a massive structure into a supersonic shard field for 20 years

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#152

Post by jandrese »

So if the big idea is to have a data center outside of legal jurisdictions why not build a floating data center in the Southern Pacific Ocean? You can power it with floating solar panels provide data via Starlink or a regular communication satellite and still be outside of the law. You might say that it will be vulnerable to pirates, but practically speaking nobody is going down there. Sure you will have to deal with weather, but overall the problems are way easier to solve than building an orbital data center.

But the real reason they won't work is because they're investor scams that were never serious in the first place.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#153

Post by foobarian »

skywhopper wrote: post #95
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"

But the cooling cost wouldn’t be smaller. There’s no good way to eliminate the waste heat into space. It’s actually far far harder to radiate the waste heat into space directly than it would be to get rid of it on Earth.

I don't know about that. Look at where the power goes in a typical data center, for a 10MW DC you might spend 2MW just to blow air around. A radiating cooler in space would almost eliminate that. The problem is the initial investment is probably impractical.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#154

Post by fragmede »

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…

> So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines.

Shut up! This is the chance for one of us to go into space! I don't care if all I'm doing is swapping 1U pizza boxes in the cold hard vacuum of space, I'm down!

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#155

Post by tstrimple »

foobarian wrote: post #139
wat10000 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things on earth also have access to that coldness for about half of each day. How many data centers use radiative cooling into the night sky to supplement their regular cooling? The fact that the answer is “zero” should tell you all you need to know about how useful this is.

The atmosphere is in the way even at night, and re-radiates the energy. The effective background temperature is the temperature of the air, not to mention it would only work at night. I think there would need to be like 50-ish acres of radiators for a 50MW datacenter to radiate from 60 to 30C. This would be a lot smaller in space due to bigger temp delta. Either way opex would be much much less than average Earth DC…

I think you’re ignoring a huge factor in how radiative cooling actually works. I thought the initial question was fine if you hadn’t read the article but understand the downvotes due to doubling down. Think of it this way. Why do thermoses have a vacuum sealed chamber between two walls in order to insulate the contents of the bottle? Because a vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector. Putting your data center into space in order to cool it is like putting a computer inside of a thermos to cool it. It makes zero fucking sense. There is nowhere for the heat to actually radiate to so it stays inside.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#157

Post by mc32 »

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…

Plus, in space, their electronic components would experience much more radiation (and the effects on components). They could build with rad-hardened components but those are both more expensive and several generations older than SOTA found in the habitable zone.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#158

Post by Animats »

Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't.

The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#159

Post by hedora »

kevdev wrote: post #6

As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically. On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can s…

Single event upsets are already commonplace at sea level well below data center scale.

The section of the article that talks about them isn’t great. At least for FPGAs, the state of the art is to run 2-3 copies of the logic, and detect output discrepancies before they can create side effects.

I guess you could build a GPU that way, but it’d have 1/3 the parallelism as a normal one for the same die size and power budget. The article says it’d be a 2-3 order of magnitude loss.

It’s still a terrible idea, pf course.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#160

Post by foobarian »

tstrimple wrote: post #155
foobarian wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The atmosphere is in the way even at night, and re-radiates the energy. The effective background temperature is the temperature of the air, not to mention it would only work at night. I think there would need to be like 50-ish acres of radiators for a 50MW datacenter to radiate from 60 to 30C. This would be a lot smaller in space due to bigger temp delta. Either way opex would be much much less than average Earth DC…

I think you’re ignoring a huge factor in how radiative cooling actually works. I thought the initial question was fine if you hadn’t read the article but understand the downvotes due to doubling down. Think of it this way. Why do thermoses have a vacuum sealed chamber between two walls in order to insulate the contents of the bottle? Because a vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector. Putting your data center into…

Pardon but this doesn't make sense to me. A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat.

>vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector

Yes we're talking about radiating not convection

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