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Starcloud

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Starcloud

#181

Post by kibwen »

btown wrote: post #167
notahacker wrote: post #52

Earlier 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

In all seriousness, if AI models can handle quantization, they can handle some flipped bits from time to time! There are probably some fascinating papers to be written around how to choose which layers in an LLM architecture could benefit more than others from redundant computation in a high-radiation environment.

Brilliant, to turn up the model temperature we just hinge open the shielding. I call dibs on the patent!

Re: Starcloud

#182

Post by coryrc »

audunw wrote: post #178
Gravityloss wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Question: for a larger system, can a heat pump be used to increase the temperature of the radiator without making the rest of the system hotter? Thus radiating more heat from fewer panels?

Your temperature differential is already 300K, so the efficiency needs to be high enough. 50K change is only 18% more cooling, but if COP=5 then it's also putting out 20% more heat...

Re: Starcloud

#183

Post by ryanisnan »

hiddencost wrote: post #175
rpmisms wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this shameful?

Because it's crank science harvesting money from people who don't understand physics. Heat is almost impossible to dissipate in space because there's negligible matter to take the heat away.

I'm inclined to think you're right, but I can't figure out one thing - the command module (apparently) in Apollo 13 got down to 38F without active heating. That's much colder than standard data centre rack temps.

In the example of a data centre, there would be considerably more heat generation than 3 astronauts, but, I would like to understand more. 38F is cold, so heat is clearly lost not as slowly as we might think.

Re: Starcloud

#184

Post by deepanwadhwa »

deepanwadhwa wrote: post #130
Reubend wrote: 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…

Not sure if I follow really. Cooling from it's own generated heat? Are we even sure the system would get that hot in the first place? The temperatures can plunge up to -200 degrees. If needed, they'd cool it just like they keep the James Webb Telescope cool.

Thank you for the responses. I understand the issue a bit more now.

Re: Starcloud

#185

Post by caminante »

torginus wrote: post #169
caminante wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The banker slide with checkboxes will be compelling: [x] no permitting, cultural, wildlife [x] no local opposition. [x] site control Unfortunately, this is balance sheet financing so big boys only.

I can't wait for the inevitable epic humanity saving mission, where the AI datacenter gets stuck in a murder loop, and we have to send up the best and brightest in a spaceship to unplug the power cable and plug it in again.

The year is 2054...

There are no offline, terrestrial porn backups.

Humanity has lost connection with the only remaining porn footage on a space datacenter called "Old Family Cooking Recipes."

A rag tag team, led by Ellen Degeneres (who still can't get hired), must perform a daring mission to press the power On/Off switch.

Re: Starcloud

#186

Post by xnx »

ryanisnan wrote: post #183
hiddencost wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's crank science harvesting money from people who don't understand physics. Heat is almost impossible to dissipate in space because there's negligible matter to take the heat away.

I'm inclined to think you're right, but I can't figure out one thing - the command module (apparently) in Apollo 13 got down to 38F without active heating. That's much colder than standard data centre rack temps. In the example of a data centre, there would be considerably more heat generation than 3 astronauts, but, I would like to understand more. 38F is cold, so heat is clearly lost not as slowly as we might think…

The Apollo passive radiators can dissipate ~2500 Watts into space. With most systems shut down, only ~500 Watts was coming from the remaining systems and the astronauts bodies.

Re: Starcloud

#187

Post by DarmokJalad1701 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #70
gtsnexp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their white paper touches on the issue, which seems slightly hand-wavy without much detail on quantification. They could potentially take advantage of heat gradients from deep space and dissipate heat to explore the Seeback effect.

Deep space? So they want to be outside geostationary orbit?

In LEO, pointing at deep-space just means away from Sun/Earth. You don't have to be in deep-space to use it for radiating heat away.

Re: Starcloud

#188

Post by taikahessu »

All these calculations (of feasibility and maintenance challenges) are fascinating, but really just silly.

Of course we are going to use AI and robots, like AI robots, and stuff. It's going to be fully self-operating and the future!

But more seriously, thanks for great learning experiences about space to HN commenters.

Re: Starcloud

#189

Post by ryanisnan »

xnx wrote: post #186
ryanisnan wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to think you're right, but I can't figure out one thing - the command module (apparently) in Apollo 13 got down to 38F without active heating. That's much colder than standard data centre rack temps. In the example of a data centre, there would be considerably more heat generation than 3 astronauts, but, I would like to understand more. 38F is cold, so heat is clearly lost not as slowly as we might think…

The Apollo passive radiators can dissipate ~2500 Watts into space. With most systems shut down, only ~500 Watts was coming from the remaining systems and the astronauts bodies.

Cool, thank you. So I read this as fundamentally, the heat they dissipated far exceeded the heat they produced. Do you mind opining on what similar figures would be with modest passive radiators and a typical data centre rack heat output?

Re: Starcloud

#190

Post by ewoodrich »

username223 wrote: post #109
righthand wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This used to be called fraud, now it’s cutesy lying?

"Naughtiness," to use the technical term ( https://paulgraham.com/founders.html ).

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
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