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I once read the suggestion to build a powerful cloud datacenter in orbital space, powering it with solar panels. That would solve any overheating problem too.
by crocowhile 7y ago
I once read the suggestion to build a powerful cloud datacenter in orbital space, powering it with solar panels. That would solve any overheating problem too.
- klyrs 7y agoSpace might be nominally cold, but it's also a vacuum. It's rather difficult to dissipate heat up there.
- dspillett 7y agoThat would work for tasks that are not latency sensitive (i.e. long compute tasks, not interactive ones) and that don't require oodles of bandwidth (or aren't time sensitive so it doesn't matter that getting the data up there for processing takes a while). IIRC typical packet round trip times for generic networking a single satellite is at least half a second, two or three times that being typical RTTs, and bandwidth is going to be orders of magnitude lower than can be achieved with land/sea wire based networks. Also dissipating heat is more problematical in space than most people intuit do to vacuum conditions. And getting the kit up there in the first place will have a large environmental impact, and upgrades will be somewhat more time consuming and otherwise resource intensive.