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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

#321

Post by AtlasBarfed »

ACCount37 wrote: post #218
collinmcnulty wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP's point is that an advanced nation-state could just as easily shoot down an orbiting data center as an oceanic data center and that "international space" offers an equally flimsy defense as "international waters" but a much larger price.

Antisatellite weapons are expensive and rare, and also woefully inadequate for dealing with megaconstellations. If there's one large orbital datacenter, then sure, ASAT is a threat to it. But if it's a dispersed swarm like the Starlink system? Good luck making a dent in that. You'd run out of ASAT long before Musk runs out of Starlink.

Lasers

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#322

Post by tim333 »

Datacenters in space may not work now but in the future when we get the robots a bit better who knows? From the Google blog:

>The Sun is the ultimate energy source in our solar system, emitting more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production. In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries. In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#323

Post by shagie »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #224
mandevil wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A data center on an orbit that is only known to the operators makes it difficult to use as a data center in a meaningful way - where do you point your uplink?

Spy satellites are individual craft. Proposals tossed about suggest significant constellates to give sufficient coverage to the land.

Suggestions involving square kilometers of solar power are not exactly things that would be easy to hide.

https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY (from YCombinator)

> Data centers in space. The problem is that data centers take up a ton of space and they need a huge amount of energy. Enter StarCloud. This is the beginning of a future where most new data centers are being built in space. They're starting small, but the goal is to build massive orbital data centers that will make computing more efficient and less of a burden on the limited resources down here on Earth.

These aren't small things. You can't hide it.

> And so we're building with a vision to build extremely large full 40 megawatt data centers. It's about 100 tons. It's what you can fit in one full Starship halo bay.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#324

Post by amitav1 »

nish__ wrote: post #194
GMoromisato wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a ridiculous waste of money.

What? Starlink made $72,000,000 in net profit last year. How is that a waste of money?

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#325

Post by amitav1 »

widforss wrote: post #44
vintermann wrote: post #39

Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion thems…

The reason why we don't see satellite-targeting missiles is not because the problem is hard. All relevant actors are capable of that.

All relevant actors are also capable of destroying ground-based data centres, but somehow that's not a huge problem for data centres.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#326

Post by amitav1 »

james-bcn wrote: post #257
gaigalas wrote: post #251

You don't need massive datacenters in space. You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That little detail outweights all sorts of costs. So, yeah. There will be datacenters in space. Probably unlike any on the ground. Smaller, very likely not running typical datacenter stuff, weirder, operating on a different set of regulations. If we're lucky, it will be like Antarctica…

>You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there. That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.

I think what the parent was saying is that unlike on Earth, there are no zoning laws or environmental regulations or NIMBYs to stall scaling.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#327

Post by shagie »

mr_toad wrote: post #288
KaiserPro wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. > 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites. Right. First power and heat are a m…

> even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes. There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.

There is one. It is the sun synchronous dawn/dusk orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

> Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night.

The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't.

Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station.

Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#328

Post by jhgb »

newsclues wrote: post #303
mr_toad wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.

The real advantage is latency but who really needs that? The military may have some use cases (think remote control of drones and the link between the controllers and satellites) but the use cases are limited

There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#329

Post by shagie »

creatonez wrote: post #91
skybrian wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Microsoft tried it and it worked, but they shelved it? https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...

It didn't work, it was an utterly terrible idea and they are almost certainly lying about the sentiment that it "worked". No ability to perform maintenance is a complete nonstarter. Communications and power is a nightmare to get right. The thermal management story sucks - just because you have metal touching water doesn't mean you have effective radiation of heat. Actually scaling it up is nearly impossible because y…

They claim it did.

Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably - https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.

> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”

> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.

> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”

Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work

#330

Post by computerdork »

cladopa wrote: post #258

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein. The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all. E.g ISS was designed and create…

Interesting point actually. yeah, when spacex was trying to build a reusable rockets, many traditional rocket scientists said that even if you are able to recover stages of the rocket, you still need to refurbish and test a great number of parts, and it just isn’t this panacea for lowering rocket costs (for example, the space shuttle, which was reusable spacecraft, but was super expensive to launch).

When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.

So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).

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