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Imagine Amazon building and launching satellites like space based data centers. AWS in orbit. You could provision VMs on a satellite equipped with an array of g
by jeletonskelly 8y ago
Imagine Amazon building and launching satellites like space based data centers. AWS in orbit. You could provision VMs on a satellite equipped with an array of general sensors, cameras, etc.
- nil_pointer 8y agoSimilar to Azure talking about developing underwater datacenters
- samstave 8y agoDid you know that eric schmidt funds a deep sea drone submersible project out of alameda to map and sensor the oceans... its funded under his and his wifes foundation, but basically its a secret project to map the oceans. They want to be first to own all that data
- fizwhiz 8y agoGot a citation handy by any chance?
- udpkts 8y agoIt's called Schmidt Ocean Institute... not a huge secret.
- whatshisface 8y agoThe odds that the military already owns a lot of it (from operating submarine sonar and all of the things that come with it) are pretty high.
- throwaway67895 8y agoThat project has been defunct for years. The company that claimed they could do it (and never even got started) has pivoted to Navy research projects.
- dragonwriter 8y agoA 501(c)(3) dedicated to open sharing of data is an odd vehicle for trying to competitively own data.
- derefr 8y agoEh. Space is just a place that's annoying to ship to. (With the one key advantage of having line-of-sight to arbitrary deployed IoT devices.) "Underwater", meanwhile, is more of a mode of operation / design for data centers, with the goal of that simplifying (and decreasing costs for) cooling. An underwater data center doesn't imply that the data center is actually off-shore to any large degree. I'd imagine they'd look more like undersea-cable landing points, built "into" a beach.
- matte_black 8y agoThis will accelerate global warming and kill off fragile ecosystems from all the heat being radiated to the oceans.
- kevinlou 8y agoI tried looking for environmental impact studies for Microsoft's data center project, but all I could find were object tracking models that their team built for tracking marine life. If a published study on this exists, I'd love to take a look.
- haney 8y agoMaybe, but it could also reduce fossil fuels used to operate less efficient cooling systems in traditional data centers. I’d love to see a breakdown on the impact of each approach.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoNot likely, water is a good heat conductor so there will just be a area of slightly warmer water near the outlet. You might get a micro ecology with some tropical fish far from their normal grounds but nothing dramatic will happen. It'll certainly not be worse for the environment than any normal data centre, unless it springs a leak and something toxic escapes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Qworg 8y agoUnderwater data centers make a great deal of sense - close to customers (low latency), fast deployments (decision to power on in 90 days), and, of course, cooling efficiencies. I expect them to actually happen if Phase 2 goes well. Then again, I'm a bit biased - I worked on both Phase 1 and 2.
- samstave 8y agoPretty sure thats the plan...
- pilsetnieks 8y agoGenuinely curious - what would be a good use for a generic cubesat with average-ish components, like cameras, sensors, radios, etc. - nothing custom made and overly specialized? Especially considering the cost.
- kodablah 8y agoI would guess you'd have a relay for any data you want transferred from non-connected devices/locations, e.g. farm equipment, wind turbines, ships, etc. Also, a client-to-space-to-EC2-only VPN in a I-am-my-own-satellite ISP may have benefits. Unsure whether by "average-ish" you meant the ability to broadcast/receive ground data.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mikepurvis 8y agoIs it really cost effective to roll your own for that kind of thing? I would have thought there were enough off the shelf satellite/m2m solutions for remote connectivity, eg https://www.orbcomm.com/en/networks/satellite https://www.orbcomm.com/en/networks/satellite
- kodablah 8y ago> Is it really cost effective to roll your own for that kind of thing? Nope, hence leveraging Amazon et al. I would consider the AWS "above the cloud" offering (as I've now dubbed it) to essentially be the same commoditized thing as what you linked. An extraterrestrial CDN with edge compute if you will.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoClearly this is a case of "cloud in the sky"
- liotier 8y agoConsidering the difficulty of dumping heat in a vacuum and the cost of orbiting huge heat exchangers, I wager that heavy computing shall remain a mostly planetary activity for quite a while longer.
- tachion 8y agoIsn't rather chilly space a great cooler for anything that heats up?
- CobrastanJorji 8y agoSadly no. Space is cold but also very low on convenient mass to transfer the heat into. Vacuum is an ideal insulator. On Earth, you can put the heat into water, air, thermal pastes, etc., but in space, you have only slow old black body radiation, unless you do something more creative.
- sek 8y agoIn simple terms space it not chilly but vacuum, so the heat can't go anywhere.
- MichaelApproved 8y agoIt's not that heat can't go anywhere, it's that there's nothing to carry heat away. On Earth, air molecules can carry heat away from you. You transfer heat to the air around you. In space, there is almost no matter around you to absorb the heat and carry it away from you. Your only option is to radiate heat away from you in the form of infrared light but that is a slow process.
- Ensorceled 8y ago> It's not that heat can't go anywhere, it's that there's nothing to carry heat away So ... the heat stays put and doesn’t go anywhere?
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- jvanderbot 8y agoThis is my research area! (JPL)
- baseballMan 8y agoIs Mark Watney a cool dude?
- jvanderbot 8y agoI only work with robotic astronauts.
- momofarm 8y agoso with the robot guy, you guys really don't need to send too many people to ISS, right?
- XnoiVeX 8y agoHow different is a commercial setup compared to running a pi with rtlsdr and a homebrew helix antenna?
- moftz 8y agoA ground station is going to involve some RF equipment first: an LNA to boost the received signal then that feeds into a down convertor to bring it to 1200MHz typically. The 1200MHz signal goes into a modem which can either be something very specific (think satellite TV set top box) or something very capable (think big server with a custom ADC capture card in the back). The modem will do some forward error correction. FEC can involve a mix of Reed-Soloman, Viterbi, and LDPC. The bits can now be sent out over a network connection. Uplink involves basically the reverse process except there is usually no FEC since you can always boost your ground antenna to be much more powerful than the one in space. An exception to that would be uplink signals meant to be relayed to the ground. More of those "bent pipe" satellites are becoming digital which allows them to process signals and make them smarter about channel utilization. All of this equipment can usually fit within a rack or two. The downlink stuff can fit within a few U. Uplink involves some big power amplifiers. Back in the 60s it would have involved dozens of racks of equipment.
- WatchDog 8y agoIm looking forward to the launch-rocket api.
- _Microft 8y agoWhat problem does this solve?
- SiempreViernes 8y agoIt would finally put the cloud in the sky! Marketing will be ecstatic over all the sky based puns they'll be allowed. Also, I guess it would solve the problem of it being expensive to put things in space by virtue of somehow having made someone else pay for vast overcapacity of sensors.
- _Microft 8y agoYou might like ... Fog Computing [0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_computing
- auslander 8y agoAWS OrbitalNuke - one way physical hashing service