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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#931

Post by DoctorOetker »

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…

> Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot.

1) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier conducting heat standing still.

2) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier in motion.

3) The heat can be transported by thermal radiation.

The first 2 require massive particles, the latter are spontaneous photons.

A thermos bottle does not simply work by eliminating the motile mass particles.

Lets consider room temperature as the outer thermos temperature and boiling hot water as the inner temperature, that is roughly 300 K and 400 K.

Thermal radiation is proportional to the fourth power of temperature and proportional to emissivity (which is between 0 and 1).

Lets pretend you are correct and thus thermally blackened glass (emissivity 1) inside the vacuum flask would be fine according to you. That would mean that the radiation from your tea to the room temperature side would be proportional to 400^4 while the thermal radiation from room temperature to the tea would be proportional to 300^4. Since (400/300) ^ 4 = 3.16 that means the heat transport from hot tea to room temperature is about 3 times higher.

If on the other hand the glass was aluminized before being pulled vacuum the heat transports are proportional to 0 * 400 K ^ 4 and 0 * 300 K ^ 4 . So the heat transport in either direction would be 0 and no net heat transport remains.

If you believe the shiny inside of your thermos flask is an aesthetic gimmick, think again.

You are making a non-comparison.

Imagine comparing a diesel engine car to an electric car, but first removing the electric motor. Does that make a fair comparison???

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#933

Post by niemandhier »

Data Centers in space make no sense due to radiation.

You cannot do two things at the same time:

1. Make electronics small. 2. Make electronics radiation resistant.

It’s a numbers game. The denser things are packed, the higher the probability that a random high energy particle or ray will damage something.

20 years ago NASA was buying old chips, because those were less susceptible, modern “radiation hardened by design” chips are better than those, but still slower than those for planetary use.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#934

Post by whycome »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #563
PunchyHamster wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even more expensive that some of the estimates flying around While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be…

Maybe you can't copyright infringe in space, but it's still infringement when the result gets back to earth.

These major AI tools have already been trained on infringing works.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#935

Post by zbentley »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #889
zbentley wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050 How unbelievably crass. "Let's build something out of immense quantities of environmentally-destructive-to-extract materials and shoot it into space on top of gargantuan amounts of heat and greenhouse gas emissions; since it won't use much earth-sourced energy once it's up there, that nets out to a win!" Insane.

Blue Origin at least runs its rockets on hydrogen whose exhaust is only water.

And heat and pressure. Negligible amounts in terms of the biosphere, but not in terms of flora and fauna in proximity to launch sites.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#936

Post by estimator7292 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #931
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…

> Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. 1) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier conducting heat standing still. 2) The heat can be transported by a heat carrier in motion. 3) The heat can be transported by thermal radiation. The first 2 require massive particles, the latter are spontaneous photons. A thermos bottle does not simply work by eliminatin…

Nobody made any of the claims you're "refuting".

You've imagined an argument so you can dunk on it to appear superior.

In addition, thermoses aren't made of glass. It is far more common to make them out of steel or aluminum.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#937

Post by estimator7292 »

dfabulich wrote: post #879
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…

In 2024, Starcloud posted their plans to "solve" the cooling problem. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the larg…

Yes, on the face of it, the plan is workable. Heat radiation scales linearly with area and exponentially (IIRC) with temperature.

It really is as simple as just adding kilometers of radiatiors. That is, if you ignore the incredible cost of transporting all that mass to orbit and assembly in space. Because there is quite simply no way to fold up kilometer-scale thermal arrays and launch in a single vehicle. There will be assembly required in space.

All in all, if you ignore all practical reality, yes, you can put a datacenter in space!

Once you engage a single brain cell, it becomes obvious that it is actually so impractical as to be literally impossible.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#938

Post by estimator7292 »

Rover222 wrote: post #928
mike_hearn wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense. 1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record. 2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be…

My lord a sensible comment her. A hearty upvote.

It really isn't. It's plainly incorrect and ignorant of the actual problems.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#939

Post by throw-qqqqq »

weinzierl wrote: post #637
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…

"A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos." A satellite is quite unlike a thermos in the sense that it is carefully tuned to keep its temperature within a relatively narrow band around room temperature .[1] during all operational phases. This is because, despite intended space usage, devices and parts are usually tested and qualified for temperature limits around room temperature. [1] "Room temperature" i…

> 1] "Room temperature" is actually a technical term meaning 20°C (exceptions in some fields and industries confirm the rule).

Yes 20 and 25°C I believe are the two most popular choices. In many cases it makes little difference with units in Kelvin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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