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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#321

Post by runarberg »

mlindner wrote: post #281
beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation. That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation. Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to rad…

It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:

> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#322

Post by dathinab »

The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is

1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level

2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.

3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.

4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.

5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.

6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.

Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?

There is zero benefit, non nada.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#324

Post by slackerIII »

Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's stored on earth than one in space.

Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power, etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.

(yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#325

Post by marcosdumay »

aunty_helen wrote: post #127
beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps. Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector. And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nan…

> aka fancy air conditioning pumps

Yeah, pumps, tubes, and fluids are some of the worst things to add to a satellite. It's probably cheaper to use more radiators.

Maybe it's possible to make something economical with Peltier elements. But it's still not even a budget problem yet, it's not plainly not viable.

> getting quite good here with nanotechnology

Small features and fractal surfaces are useless here.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#326

Post by hahahahhaah »

bs7280 wrote: post #163

As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon? The moon has: - Some water - Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?) - a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem - a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem - close enou…

Best bet is to put the servers in a rocket, go around the moon then land back on earth. Then install them in USE1.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#327

Post by variaga »

phire wrote: post #244

As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres. And nobody ever calls them out on it. Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away…

This is the correct analysis.

Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#330

Post by rybosworld »

NegativeK wrote: post #319
rybosworld wrote: post #248

It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?" And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite. But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?" The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.

With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck". I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare. So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.

Well said.
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