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Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

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Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#71

Post by piloto_ciego »

rbanffy wrote: post #17
CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used. It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.

NIMBY stuff is an issue too, I live in AK and would love if we started building them, but there are infrastructure problems and then people who have never worked in the arctic frantically pitching a fit about caribou they’ve never seen.

NIMBY stuff is why we will go to space. In space nobody can tell you “no.”

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#72

Post by piloto_ciego »

ForHackernews wrote: post #9

Tyranny of the rocket equation[0] makes it hard for me to conceive how an orbital data centre could ever make sense. If you just want to escape permitting laws, why not float it in international waters? That's a much more accessible and hospitable environment than LEO. [0] https://archive.is/qp4gP

You can't just sea-stead your way to it though, salt water + network accessibility + literal piracy + how much data you can move + the environmental toll of doing much of anything on the see = equally crazy challenges with more laws that can stop you.

By the time you got permission to lay all the cables you'd need to lay, etc. your competition would already be done with their space data center, or Lunar one in a peak of eternal sunshine or whatever. This is a race to the most compute. Whoever gets the most geniuses in their "country of geniuses in a datacenter" wins.

Wins what? Well, everything they want effectively forever.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#73

Post by piloto_ciego »

jmyeet wrote: post #59

Let's be honest. The only reason orbital data centers are a talking point at all is to justify the stratospheric SpaceX valuation for the IPO. There's literally no other reason. Everybody who knows anything about data centers understands this. You don't even need to get into the thermodynamics of cooling where the only option is radiating away heat. Terrestial data centers have to use water cooling because the heat g…

I mean, I think it's cool and a "good idea" in terms of getting off this rock and out into the black.

We can do it, we just have to decide we want to. If we're going to have a Tulip Mania Redux I'd rather have it with space data centers and reusable rockets and autonomous human-level AI moonshots/boondoggles than... I don't know, literal tulips, or factoring large numbers to mine bitcoin or whatever...

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#74

Post by elcritch »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #69
elcritch wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A startup I worked at is building wave-powered data centers [1]. 1: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-building-inferen...

Huh. I thought the field had mostly soured on wave power due to the incredible engineering challenges. Cheaper+easier to do wind or solar. I guess you can slap “For AI” onto anything to overcome the economics.

They have a unique design where only a turbine moves with very cheap electricity produced.

AI inference gives them a great way to turn revenue from cheap electricity without solving the device-to-shore problem yet for that energy.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#75

Post by Zardoz84 »

tintor wrote: post #66
tzs wrote: post #60

There's also the issue of scaling. Say you can make the engineering work for building a data center in space. Nobody wants to build just one, or even just a handful. Musk has talked about 10000 launches a year for deploying and maintaining data centers. At that scale pollution becomes a serious issue. It hasn't been a problem so far because we haven't launched a lot of rockets. Cumulatively the world has under about…

There are non-polluting ways of launching. SpinLaunch

Hidrogen fuel

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#76

Post by arjie »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #63
arjie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up. To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best…

No permits needed in international waters, and PV arrays work fine there. He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.

There was one barge DC from Nautilus[0]. The problem was to get the amount of power they needed shore power, and fiber from there. Undersea is absolutely crazy to me. But surface vessels are interesting. I wonder what you do: tie a massive gas tanker to a powership (ocean sees night - space doesn't) and then put a container ship full of chips nearby? International waters aren't that far off, so you could reasonably run a fiber line back to shore for interconnect but to get actual full decoupling, I suppose you'd use Starlink.

Sounds terrific actually haha. Boy would that be a sight to behold.

0: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nautilus-puts-sto...

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#77

Post by PowerfulWizard »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #61
PowerfulWizard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To remove heat by radiation there's a big benefit to running the GPUs hotter as the radiation will be proportional to the fourth power of temperature. This resource is using 85 deg C versus 60 deg C for OP which will improve cooling performance. If Nvidia/SpaceX can make the chips run at a higher temperature that would help a lot although I assume it would have already been done if it were possible. Another option is…

Could they run the chips at "normal" temperatures and then heat pump that all into some other mass that lives at "aerospace alloy" temperatures and radiates it away more efficiently?

I think it's possible, I'm not familiar with what's really been tried but I see that there are some publications on it, for example there's an ESA project under way: https://connectivity.esa.int/archives/projects/heat-pump-cen...

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#78

Post by CamperBob2 »

arjie wrote: post #76
CamperBob2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No permits needed in international waters, and PV arrays work fine there. He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.

There was one barge DC from Nautilus[0]. The problem was to get the amount of power they needed shore power, and fiber from there. Undersea is absolutely crazy to me. But surface vessels are interesting. I wonder what you do: tie a massive gas tanker to a powership (ocean sees night - space doesn't) and then put a container ship full of chips nearby? International waters aren't that far off, so you could reasonably r…

No, you just use solar panels on the container ship. The same ones you'd use on a satellite.

There are thousands of container ships in international waters at any given time, so you wouldn't install a few massive power-hungry data centers on a few ships. You'd put a lot of PV-powered data centers on a lot of ships. Pretend you launched them into space, in other words... but don't actually launch them.

And yes, you'd network them via Starlink, just like the satellites would be.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#79

Post by arjie »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #78
arjie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was one barge DC from Nautilus[0]. The problem was to get the amount of power they needed shore power, and fiber from there. Undersea is absolutely crazy to me. But surface vessels are interesting. I wonder what you do: tie a massive gas tanker to a powership (ocean sees night - space doesn't) and then put a container ship full of chips nearby? International waters aren't that far off, so you could reasonably r…

No, you just use solar panels on the container ship. The same ones you'd use on a satellite. There are thousands of container ships in international waters at any given time, so you wouldn't install a few massive power-hungry data centers on a few ships. You'd put a lot of PV-powered data centers on a lot of ships. Pretend you launched them into space, in other words... but don't actually launch them. And yes, you'd…

But ships have night. The PVs would need backup batteries for the entire night-time period to say nothing of the 4x capacity loss. A satellite can just see the sun the whole time and it's getting nice clean sunshine. I think the powership works better.

Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him. So long as it keeps happening, the probability that he is just much smarter than me and predicting the future better dominates the probability that he keeps getting lucky.

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