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Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

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Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#201

Post by Sanzig »

api wrote: post #173
perihelions wrote: post #171

I wonder if there could be some way to photolitograph compute circuits directly onto a radiator substrate, and accomplish a fully-passive thermal solution that way. Consider the heat-conduction problem: from dimensional analysis, the required thickness of a (conduction-only) radiator plate with a regular grid of heat sources on it shrinks superlinearly as you subdivide those heat sources (from few large sources, into…

Look at the thermal shield design for the JWST. Could you have a data center that unfolds into a multi-layered plane where the outer solar collector layer faces the sun, an intermediate layer shields infrared emissions from the back side of that, and the final layer that always faces away from the sun holds (or is) a bunch of chips? Park it in an orbit where it can stay oriented this way or an L point. Free compute f…

> Also do chips in space need casing or could the wafers be just exposed on that back layer?

Even in LEO they benefit tremendously from radiation shielding, even a couple millimeters of aluminum greatly reduces the total ionizing dose. Also LEO has the issue of monatomic oxygen in the thermosphere which tends to react aggressively with the surface of anything it touches. An aluminium spacecraft structure isn't really affected, but I don't think it'd be very good for a semiconductor wafer.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#202

Post by littlestymaar »

Robotbeat wrote: post #198
littlestymaar wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't health “risk”, there are risks but there are also health effects that will come with certainty . For instance, low gravity deplete your muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle. This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount of medical monitoring the guys up there receive…

Then just provide spin gravity for the crew habitat.

“just”

It's theoretically possible for sure, but we've never done that in practice and it's far from trivial.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#203

Post by lumost »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76

Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components. As a first cut, this would re…

I used to build and operate data center infrastructure. There is very limited reason to do anything more than a warranty replacement on a GPU. With a high quality hardware vendor that properly engineers the physical machine, failure rates can be contained to less than .5% per year. Particularly if the network has redundancy to avoid critical mass failures.

In this case, I see no reason to perform any replacements of any kind. Proper networked serial port and power controls would allow maintenance for firmware/software issues.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#204

Post by lumost »

asah wrote: post #182
vidarh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon. Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect lo…

serious q: how much extra failure rate would you expect from the physical transition to space? on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration of the flight and loss of gravity...

I suspect the thermal system would look very different from a terrestrial component. Fans and connectors can shake loose - but do nothing in space.

Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#205

Post by itsoktocry »

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #186
weinzierl wrote: post #138

Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first place? Free cooling? Doesn't make much sense to me. As the article points out the radiators need to me massive. Access to solar energy? Solar is more efficient in space, I'll give them that, but does that really outweigh the whole hassle to put the panels in space in the first place? Physical isolation and security? Against manipulation maybe, but not agains…

My initial thought was: ambiguous regulatory environment. Not being physically located the US, the EU, or any other sovereign territory, they could plausably claim exemption from pretty much any national regulations.

This might be true, but unrealistic.

If you run amiss of US (or EU) regulators, they will never say, "well, it's in space, out of our jurisdiction!".

They will make your life hell on Earth.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#206

Post by neom »

weinzierl wrote: post #138

Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first place? Free cooling? Doesn't make much sense to me. As the article points out the radiators need to me massive. Access to solar energy? Solar is more efficient in space, I'll give them that, but does that really outweigh the whole hassle to put the panels in space in the first place? Physical isolation and security? Against manipulation maybe, but not agains…

I've talked to the founder of Starcloud about this, there is just going to be a lot of data generative stuff in space in the future, and further and further out into space. He thinks now is the right time to learn how to compute up there because people will want to process, and maybe orchestrate processing between many devices, in space. He's fully aware of all of the objections in this hn comments section, he just doesn't believe they are insurmountable and he believes interoperable compute hubs in space will be required over the next 20/30 years. He's in his mid 20s, so it seems like a reasonable mission to be on to me.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#207

Post by rtkwe »

btown wrote: post #185
rajnathani wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what I was thinking when the OP comment brought up "regular launches containing replacement hardware", this is easily solvable by actually "treating servers as cattle and not pets" whereby one would simply over-provision servers and then simply replace faulty servers around once per year. Side: Thanks for sharing about the "bathtub curve", as TIL and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before especially as…

https://accendoreliability.com/the-bath-tub-curve-explained/ is an interesting breakdown of bath tub curve dynamics for those curious!

Wonder if you could game that in theory by burning in the components on the surface before launch or if the launch would cause a big enough spike from the vibration damage that it's not worth it.

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#208

Post by zarzavat »

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #186
weinzierl wrote: post #138

Why do they want to put a data center in space in the first place? Free cooling? Doesn't make much sense to me. As the article points out the radiators need to me massive. Access to solar energy? Solar is more efficient in space, I'll give them that, but does that really outweigh the whole hassle to put the panels in space in the first place? Physical isolation and security? Against manipulation maybe, but not agains…

My initial thought was: ambiguous regulatory environment. Not being physically located the US, the EU, or any other sovereign territory, they could plausably claim exemption from pretty much any national regulations.

Space is terrible for that. There's only a handful of countries with launch vehicles and/or launch sites. You obviously need to be in their good graces for the launch to be approved.

If you want permissive regulatory environment, just spend the money buying a Mercedes for some politician in a corrupt country, you'll get a lot further...

Re: Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship

#210

Post by aleph_minus_one »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #60

If I'm reading this correctly, the idea is 1. YOLO. Yeet big data into orbit! 2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there! 3. Profit! It could make sense if the entire DC was designed as a completely modular system. Think ISS without the humans. Every module needs to have a guaranteed lifetime, and then needs to be safely yet destructively deorbited after its replacement (shiny new module) do…

> 2. People will pay big bucks to keep their data all the way up there!

Just to make me understand the business plan better: why would people or companies to be willing to pay much more to have their data (or computations) done in space?

The only reason that I can imagine is that the satellite which contains the data center also has a lot of sensors mounted (think military spying devices), and either for security, capacity or latency reasons you prefer the sensor data to be processed in space instead of transferring it down to earth, process it there, and sending the results back to space.

In other words: the business model is getting big money defense contracts (somewhat ignoring whether the idea really makes military sense or not).

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