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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#281

Post by mdaniel »

amluto wrote: post #72
ianhowson wrote: post #41

I had a good laugh. - You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price. - You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet. - You need a heat transport mediu…

Also: repairs. Every time I read someone’s story about large-scale ML training, a bunch of it is about identifying failing or flaky equipment and fixing it. That’s not so easy in space.

Nonsense, it's right there in the acronym: Space Reliability Engineer (or I guess one could also just leave "Site" as is, since space is for sure a site). That PagerDuty rotation is gonna be hell

Re: Starcloud

#283

Post by d-moon »

- radhard electronics require a different sdk to maintain good seu/tid, and also require a higher layout overhead to maintain these metrics.

- radhard sdks aren't offered at sota node sizes.

- they are much much more expensive

If they can partner with a chipmaker (AMD :^)) and use that as a way to collect some meaningful data, that would be useful at the very least.

Re: Starcloud

#284

Post by osigurdson »

stephenhandley wrote: post #118
dfabulich wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators depl…

I was trying to put these sizes in rough perspective. ISS is the largest man-made object in space, which is basically the size of a football field (half a hectare) and cost $150B. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/comparison-of-size-of-int... The whitepaper shows a 4km x 4km solar array, which is 1600 hectares (3200 International Space Stations). Would assume the array they're proposing would be cheaper since its st…

To be fair, YC says they mostly invest in founders, not ideas. So, expect a pivot at some point.

Re: Starcloud

#285

Post by emmelaich »

Reason077 wrote: post #276
phs318u wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beaming power down to Earth from space-based solar collectors is a concept that's been around for a while. "Dr. Glaser is best known as the inventor of the Solar Power Satellite concept, which he first presented in the journal Science for November 22, 1968 (“Power from the Sun: It’s Future”). In 1973 he was granted a U.S. patent on the Solar Power Satellite to supply power from space for use on the Earth." One thing…

> "A very small angular error in beaming could result in being literally microwaved." One of the SimCity games had this as an occasional disaster event. You had to make sure your ground collector stations weren't too close to the rest of the city or risk setting your buildings on fire.

Reminds me of the malfunctioning space laser news story from Robocop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CrTJEY8zNs

Such fun.

Re: Starcloud

#286

Post by justanotheratom »

thrance wrote: post #50
justanotheratom wrote: post #3

wow, one year back, I had made a prediction to a friend that this is the direction that Starlink will head in. I was thinking it would proceed like this: 1. provide internet. 2. provide CDN. 3. Edge Compute. 4. Full-on cloud. These guys see to be focussing on what is basically offline processing (AI training).

More like, these guys will be focused on parting VCs from their money. Datacenters in space makes no sense at all. Even ignoring the huge cost of sending hardware there in the first place, cooling is a massive issue in space. No medium to sink heat into means the only way to cool anything is by running water through giant infrared radiators. Not ideal when cooling is the largest bottleneck in scaling datacenters. Not…

Interesting. I was assuming that cooling is basically a non-issue in space. I'll need to read up on that.

Re: Starcloud

#287

Post by emmelaich »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #178

Is this an elaborate joke? I believe so given all the very real physical problems with this, but “GPT-6” training was what pushed it undoubtedly over the edge to pure joke.

I liked "Secure contracts which incumbent hyper scalers"

Not even English.

Re: Starcloud

#288

Post by spinarrets »

Why couldn't you deploy all those solar panels on earth. Then you could supply the grid when you weren't training models, you could recycle your components when they got old, you wouldn't need launches, you could maintain things if they break, and sure, spend a bunch of money to figure out large radiators that could radiate heat out of the atmosphere.

Be the start of a geoengineering project that is actively collecting energy and radiating it out into space while performing useful work along the way. Infrared radiation between 8 and 13 micrometers isn't absorbed by the atmosphere and exits the planet.

So, why not build big infra here and if you can build powerful radiators, aim them up and away from the earth, which needs to be cooled a bit anyways!

Re: Starcloud

#289

Post by FridgeSeal »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #133
hnuser123456 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously use the heat pumps to concentrate the thermal energy up to 2700k, then conduct it along a bunch of tungsten filaments, now it's the world's biggest incandescent lightbulb on top of being the first datacenter in space. Maybe get it up to 4000k for a more modern lighting look. Guess we're gonna assume the dark forest hypothesis is false.

Could they concentrate the energy and beam it down to earth as a source for electricity generation on the ground?

Energy efficiency?

From my AI data centre project??

Get out of here, we’re only interested in getting rich, we don’t actually care about doing something _useful_ for people.

Re: Starcloud

#290

Post by FridgeSeal »

Thanks.

I hate it.

Let’s definitely downplay the physics _and_ pollute orbit in service of what will no doubt be producing yet more AI slop. So good.

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