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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

#221

Post by inejge »

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…

> On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs

As a sibling post noted, SEUs are possible all the way down to sea level. The recent Airbus mass intervention was essentially a fix for a badly handled SEU in a corner case.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#222

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

bouncycastle wrote: post #191
wat10000 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting data centers on ships in international waters would be just as effective at evading government control (i.e. not very) while being orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to build and operate.

Recently the USA blew out some some boats in international waters and came back to finish off the survivors, despite thin evidence and no due process, while maintaining that it was legal. If those data centers on ships ever become declared as a 'threat to national security' then they might get the same treatment.

If those ships chose to not fly a flag, they'd even have justification to do so. And if they did choose to fly a flag, then that country would have the responsibility to police them, and is the US complained to that country, that country might just withdraw protection anyway. Data center ships just want to loiter where convenient, they're not cigarette boats flying along at 100mph... no way to evade a navy that wants to blow them out of the water.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#223

Post by sdenton4 »

hedora wrote: post #159
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 budg…

It strikes me that neutral network inference loads are probably pretty resilient to these kinds of problems (as we see the bits per activation steadily decreasing), and where they aren't, you can add them as augmentations at training time and they will essentially act as regularization.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#224

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

mandevil wrote: post #173
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical location is difficult to dodge unfortunately. Fiscal rules are sort of man made.

The Outer Space Treaty is very very clear: anything launched into space is the responsibility of the country that launched it. Even if a private company payts for it and operates it, it's still the responsibility of the launching nation. Even if you launch from international waters, your operating company is still registered to a specific country, and the company is made up of citizens of one or more countries, and i…

Spy satellites maneuver so that no one can tell who launched them, or when. If these satellites can do the same, good luck pinning responsibility on someone on the ground. Hell, with Musk's low orbit network, he could probably even provide connectivity to them in a plausibly-deniable manner.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#225

Post by dosbod »

echelon wrote: post #181
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

My favorite F-15 kill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT

The military have developed other ways to bring down satellites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater

Whats less well known is as the Ionsphere heats up the upper atmosphere, it bulges out into space like a tyre sidewall bulge. This has the effect of putting an atmosphere in the path of LEO satellite, which then causes the LEO satellite to fall to earth because they are not designed to travel through an atmosphere.

Joule heating is the most important one which can alter the thermospheric dynamics quite significantly.[1]

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#226

Post by kiba »

GMoromisato wrote: post #187
morshu9001 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what price per MW of load?

The Starlink constellation cost $10 billion. That’s comparable to a small data center (maybe 50,000 gpus). If launch costs keep dropping and environmental costs keep rising, space based data centers will make sense.

Land cost will also start to matter, but probably not at the scale that Starlink is doing. Regardless, orbitals are real estate.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#227

Post by jillesvangurp »

There are lots of reasons why keeping data centers on the ground might be cheaper but the article seems to be skipping over a few things.

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions.

2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was.

3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.

4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore.

5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is.

In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#228

Post by schiffern »

Animats wrote: post #158

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 Ear…

  >"A City on Mars" (2024)
I wasn't terribly impressed with this one. I found it mostly just a bundle of vague negativity and insufficient (disingenuous?) use of problem-solving. However if you want to try it then give the rebuttal a fair shake too.

https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#229

Post by smcin »

mangecoeur wrote: post #214
collinmcnulty wrote: post #197

To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.

Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens. Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits. The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much mon…

If Arthur C Clarke was still alive, he would be much in demand as sci-fi frontperson for these.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#230

Post by tjpnz »

skywhopper wrote: post #97
awei wrote: post #15

The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things: - We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years. - We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up…

Starship is on a fast track to failure. It is not a cheaper way to get to orbit and will never get there at the current pace. And even if it were, it would not make getting to orbit so cheap that it would somehow make it economically viable to put a datacenter there. You still have to build the GPUs, etc for the datacenter whether it’s on Earth or in orbit. But to put it in space you also need massive new cooling sol…

It will make getting to orbit cheaper, significantly so, but I can't see it being rapidly reusable. Rapidly refurbishable perhaps if Starship were modular and the heat shield could be quickly swapped out on site where necessary. But being able to top off the methalox and fly again? That's a pipe dream. Orbital spaceflight isn't like air travel in any sense.
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