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Starcloud

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Starcloud

#31

Post by stevage »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #18
petesergeant wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their website pitches it as 16 square km

Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field. Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.

It says "Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length."

So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.

Re: Starcloud

#33

Post by axegon_ »

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…

My initial thought was "cooling is going to be a fun challenge, in addition to data transfer, latency, hardware maintenance and all that other fun stuff". It truly feels like one of those, you-have-too-much-money moments.

Re: Starcloud

#34

Post by actionfromafar »

jiggawatts wrote: post #15

This is absolute nonsense. The first thing to consider is that this thing won’t be stationary! Geosynchronous orbit is much more expensive to reach per kg launched, even for Starship… when it starts working properly. Lower orbits… aren’t stationary. Who wants a data centre that’s “over the horizon” from the owning country most of the time!? If you think AWS egress costs are bad? Just add some zeroes! No, more zeroes…

It will soon come back from over the other horizon. :)

Of all the things insane about this proposal, I'm not very bothered about this one. It could be high availability and distributed by default. Like having redundant datacenters with eventual consistency on all continents. Except the continents are spinning really fast above you...

The animation is wild... 5GW concentrated up there at the top of a field of solar panels - it's not a Starcloud, it's an electric Starfurnace.

Re: Starcloud

#35

Post by xnx »

Shameful to see this on Nvidia's site. They have real engineers and business prowess. This is really shaking my assumptions about the company.

Re: Starcloud

#36

Post by [deleted] »

non- wrote: post #29

One of the selling points they mention is that they won't need to use any fresh water for cooling. My understanding was that water-demands on Earth were an overblown issue and minuscule when compared to other uses of fresh water such as watering one acre of farmland. Not to mention, "used" water is just "warm" water that can then be used again for other purposes. So are they perpetuating a myth here? Or is water use…

[deleted]

Re: Starcloud

#37

Post by martindbp »

bearjaws wrote: post #28

We've officially lost the plot, we will now ship our AI data centers to ~space~ ... This will not work with modern technology. The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day, requiring you to either shift all workloads or add substantial UPS weight. The radiator grid you need to cool 125kw is something like 16x the size of the entire data center. I watched this video last week that went into 3 different scenari…

So what you're saying is we should put them on the moon?

Re: Starcloud

#38

Post by BoppreH »

stevage wrote: post #27

> Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length. That is...very, very large.

For scale, that's twice as large (energy-wise) as AWS's us-east-1, which itself is a group of ~170 data centers.

Re: Starcloud

#39

Post by blondie9x »

“The only energy is the launch”, that’s false.

Energy went into mining, extracting, refining, transporting all the raw materials needed to make these chips.

This is typical tech industry green washing as the industry fails to accept its destructive influence on the planet.

We need practical solutions that help reduce consumption and waste and actually address the issues. We don’t always need more we need to find a way to use less.

Re: Starcloud

#40

Post by bpicolo »

> In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space,” Johnston predicts.

Can I bet on the contrary odds? Could throw down my whole retirement with confidence

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