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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#781

Post by spongebobstoes »

variaga wrote: post #318
spongebobstoes wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space perhaps I'm missing something?

Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then? Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too. How efficient…

h100 can operate at 80-90C continuously, so 70C seems conservative

I'm not advocating for space GPUs as a logical next step. so many unsolved problems remain

point is that launch costs per kg are a more realistic blocker than cooling

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#782

Post by wat10000 »

aunty_helen wrote: post #309
wat10000 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand. It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth…

For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done. Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10? As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.

If we define a data center as a place where computers run primarily to serve distant users, then we've had data centers in space for decades.

Nobody should doubt that it's possible, since it's been done. It just doesn't make any sense to do it purely for the sake of having computers do things that could be done on the ground.

There's nothing weird about using jet engines to make electricity. The design of a turbine designed to generate thrust isn't necessarily that different from a turbine designed to generate electricity. You can buy a new Avon gas turbine generator today, the same engine used in the Canberra, Comet, Draken, and many others. It makes about a million times more economic sense than putting GPUs in space to run LLMs.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#783

Post by krisoft »

sandworm101 wrote: post #743
kimixa wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same. Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for…

Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for those activities that can only be done from space. For general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the globe are full. This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will line up to give it to him…

> Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it will run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it will in space

That is clearly not true. How do you power the data center on antarctica? May i remind you it will be in the shadow of earth for half a year.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#784

Post by alcomatt »

heat dissipation is one thing - another is the recycling - anything he shoots into the orbit will essentially be disposable, single use DCs. Once they fail, it will be just a dangerous junk waiting to be deorbited. And all the precious materials which normally get recycled will be lost....

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#785

Post by georgemcbay »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #572
georgemcbay wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> xAI needs money to win the AI race Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way. Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where som…

> Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way. Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world. So it is worth all the effort to be the first.

> Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world.

This may be what they are going for, but there are two effectively religious beliefs with this line of thinking, IMO.

The first is that LLMs lead to AGI.

The second is that even if the first did turn out to be true that they wouldn't all stumble into AGI at the same time, which given how relatively lockstep all of the models have been for the past couple of years seems far more likely to me than any single company having a breakthrough the others don't immediately reproduce.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#786

Post by spongebobstoes »

cdf wrote: post #361
spongebobstoes wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space perhaps I'm missing something?

The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS. How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big? Do you see how unrealistic this is? Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.

my point is that cooling is not the problem, launch cost per kg is

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#787

Post by goalieca »

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…

> Musk is up to something here.

This is Musk, yet again, pulling themes from sci-fi books. He has that vision of ushering in the "future" which is good for dragging us forward but also he fails a lot. His open letter cited the Kardashev scale and his vision for getting us forward like in the novel accelerando.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#788

Post by krick »

Honestly, it is funny that people even seriously discuss this. I mean, now. It is such a blatant bullshit that you'd expect this time people would say "okay, now Musk went too far, nobody would buy into this". Yeah, I wish.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#789

Post by adastra22 »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #710
adastra22 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does water scarcity have to do with anything? Data centers don't use water. They slightly heat it, and then it flows back out to whatever it would have done anyway.

They need fresh water which is scarce unlike salt water, once they use it, it can't be used for anything else. They're competing with water supplies of municipalities these days. Not a big deal if you're near the great lakes or the missisipi, but a big deal in california, arizona, utah,etc.. and that's just the US. There are places that are becoming unlivable because of water supply issues, and datacenters are needin…

> once they use it, it can't be used for anything else

This is not true!

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