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Starcloud
https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
- VladVladikoff 1y agois this a joke? isn't cooling in space a really big problem? how does it make sense to run a data centre with huge cooling requirements in a place where cooling is very difficult to accomplish?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- UberFly 1y agoMost expensive IT call ever when you need to go fix that one fried power convertor that everyone said wouldn't fail.
- jklinger410 1y agoDang that's very cool. As long as up and down bandwidth stay strong and reliable.
- alanfranz 1y agoI doubt you need that much bandwidth or reliability. Training is “on site”, you just need to upload training material once, then download the trained model.
- justanotheratom 1y agowow, one year back, I had made a prediction to a friend that this is the direction that Starlink will head in. I was thinking it would proceed like this: 1. provide internet. 2. provide CDN. 3. Edge Compute. 4. Full-on cloud. These guys see to be focussing on what is basically offline processing (AI training).
- thrance 1y agoMore like, these guys will be focused on parting VCs from their money. Datacenters in space makes no sense at all. Even ignoring the huge cost of sending hardware there in the first place, cooling is a massive issue in space. No medium to sink heat into means the only way to cool anything is by running water through giant infrared radiators. Not ideal when cooling is the largest bottleneck in scaling datacenters. Note that they would also have to dissipate the large amounts heat their datacenter satellite gets from being exposed to the Sun. Also disregard the cost it takes to send a technician for maintenance, of updating hardware, etc.
- ekianjo 1y ago> Also disregard the cost it takes to send a technician for maintenance, of updating hardware, etc. This won't happen. If a satellite fails they will just write it off. Maintenance would be more expensive than depreciation
- justanotheratom 1y agoInteresting. I was assuming that cooling is basically a non-issue in space. I'll need to read up on that.
- zamalek 1y agoWhat does space give us that Earth does not in this scenario? Free real estate? They only mention falling costs for deployment.
- tux3 1y ago[flagged]
- xnx 1y agoI do wonder about data centers in the arctic. Cut out the middle step of greenhouse gases and melt the polar caps directly.
- chewbacha 1y agoNot to mention the benefit of directly harming extremely vulnerable ecosystems! Win-win
- btown 1y ago[flagged]
- dang 1y agoCan you please not post comments like this? Thoughtful criticism is welcome, of course, but this sort of thing isn't. Besides breaking the site guidelines, it takes threads in less interesting directions and evokes even worse comments from others. We're trying to avoid that here. "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ceejayoz 1y agoIsn’t cooling already a major issue for spacecraft? The big radiators on the ISS can only dump a few server racks worth of heat.
- thekoma 1y agoHow does “passive cooling” work in space?
- donyccie 1y agoSame question
- geuis 1y agoLarge radiators like on the ISS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
- ceejayoz 1y agoWith an emphasis on large. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control?wpr... > Most spacecraft radiators reject between 100 and 350 W of internally generated electronics waste heat per square meter.
- daeken 1y agoMassive radiators. The ISS has radiators that have a dissipation capacity of about 3m^2/kW. If we use that number, we'd need a 3000m^2 radiator per megawatt, which is the scale they're talking about. This could theoretically be brought down, but not even by an order of magnitude. I wonder how much cooling the solar panels alone would need, when operating at that scale.
- echoangle 1y agoThe radiators on the ISS aren’t passive though, they have actively pumped fluid loops to get heat from the hot parts into the radiators.
- alfiedotwtf 1y agoThat's interesting to know. But since it's space, how do they then cool down the hot fluid?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- brador 1y agoSolar Radiation and bitrot/damage, how you solving it? Whats your shielding stack?
- Havoc 1y ago>passive cooling huh? I was under the impression that cooling in space is an absolute nightmare since radiating heat into vacuum is super hard? Even the comparatively small and decidedly H100-free ISS needed giant radiators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System#/media/File:EATCS.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
- thrance 1y agoThese two words are a massive red flags, signaling this is nothing more than a giant grift, like most of today's economy.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoI very much agree here. This is clearly nothing more than a scam meant to separate investors from their money. I read the "white paper" and very few of their suppositions actually hold water, as many others have detailed in this thread. It seems like what this kind of "startup" does is pick two or three trending words, put them together and make up a story that would be believable to people who don't dig too deep. These guys chose the words "AI" and "space" and figured out how to stick them together. Speaking of that, anyone want to invest in my new quantum blockchain technology?
- znkynz 1y agoCan't wait to experience a Gigawatt DC re-entering a la Cosmos 482.
- rzzzt 1y agoFree hardware delivered to your doorstep!
- pauletienney 1y agoMake something hard harder, just because
- arm32 1y agoIt'll provide Earth more shade from that pesky sun!
- mplanchard 1y agoThey’re really proposing it as an oblique solution to climate change
- davidczech 1y agoData center on Mars. I will call it MartianCloud.
- xnx 1y agoCan this possibly make financial sense even if launch costs were zero? One NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD consumes 10 kW which would be ~500 square feet of solar panels and ~100 square feet of radiator area.
- transpute 1y agohttps://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/the-answer-to-techs-clean-energy-problem-put-data-centres-in-space-6pl9z5zbw https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/th... > Their design calls for a cluster of shipping container-style boxes packed with high-speed AI chips. These would be anchored at the centre of a 16 sq km array of solar panels generating up to five gigawatts of power — about 25 per cent more than Drax, Britain’s biggest power station. The mammoth structure would circle the Earth in “sun synchronous” orbit so that it is never in shade
- xnx 1y agoA continuous five gigawatts of power would be seriously impressive. I think that's about $12 million/day (terrestrial prices). This plan seems about as realistic as Bluthton though. https://www.reddit.com/r/arresteddevelopment/comments/1gtyvvu/which_bluthton_would_you_rather_live_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/arresteddevelopment/comments/1gtyvv...
- semi-extrinsic 1y agoTheir whitepaper clearly demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge of thermal engineering. E.g. heat pumps are described as magical things. They are literally planning to feed the radiators using a coolant like water and sensible heat at 35 degC to 5 degC. At 5 GW, you then need to be pumping 60 000 liters of water per second. That's like a tenth of the Sacramento river, going through a 16 sq km array in space and hoping that nothing leaks.
- xnx 1y ago> 60 000 liters of water per second Then they just need to worry about the extra friction heat generated by moving that much liquid.
- divbzero 1y agoI was wondering if these server racks in space would need to be specifically designed for enough radiative cooling. Apparently the answer is yes: the radiators would be expansive and placed on the reverse side of the solar panels. Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating primarily towards deep space, which has an average temperature of about 2.7 Kelvin or -270°C. The radiators can be positioned in-line with the solar arrays as shown in Figure 3, with one side exposed to sunlight. … Figure 3. A data center in Sun Synchronous Orbit, showing a 4km x 4km deployed solar array and radiators. https://www.starcloud.com/wp https://www.starcloud.com/wp
- abetaha 1y agoDefinitely an out of this world idea. I wonder if their micro datacenter is going to be self-sufficient power wise using only solar energy? And how would they address the hardware failures that are likely when you train large language models at scale?
- 827a 1y agoGiven the purported cost benefits in their whitepaper [1], hardware failures might be an irrelevant rounding error. They suggest something to the tune of 100x cheaper. [1] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
- abetaha 1y agoThe white paper back of the envelope calculations show a 4km x 4km solar panels and radiators are required for a 5 GW datacenter. I am not sure how the authors were not cracking up while writing that white paper.
- appleaday1 1y agoHow I sniffed and stole training data and model data over the air to "Starcloud" posts gonna be crazy amount in abundance
- jedberg 1y agoI've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel because of this. So the next thought was space. At the time, launching to space was way too costly for it to ever make sense. But now, with much cheaper launches, space is accessible. Power seems easily solved. You can get lots of free energy from the sun with some modest panels. But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult. Or you can go geostationary over a powerful ground station, but then you'd need some really big batteries for all the time you aren't in the sun. But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution.
- pauletienney 1y agoI have no clue about space technology but many comments point the difficulty to cool anything in space. If Starcloud had an innovative solution to this problem, why on Earth (sic) focus on data centers when they could help the entire space industry? It does not smell good.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago>But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution. Their main tech breakthrough would have to be in this area otherwise the company is worthless imo.
- daeken 1y agoIt's possible to do all of this with current technology. Just... Why? The cost would be exorbitant; even with really clever deployment tech, the launch costs are gonna be dominated by solar panels and radiators. This is a super cool idea and seems like perfect investor-bait. That's about where it ends.
- vanilla 1y agospace debris, radiation and no maintenance. The buzzwords sure sound cool, but make absolutely no sense.
- jsheard 1y agoAside from the obvious cooling issues people have already mentioned, isn't cosmic radiation also very unkind to modern ultra dense silicon? AIUI they tend to use really old silicon processes in space stuff for that reason, and even then they have to build in redundant compute to mitigate logic errors that probably wouldn't happen on Earth.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> They tend to use really old silicon processes in space stuff for that reason. To be fair that's mostly part "if it works don't change it" and part "that's how we've always done it". SpX uses newer hardware w/ traditional OSs (linux) w/ lots of redundancy.
- megiddo 1y agoThis. Had to deal with cosmic rays on earth in data centers 20 years ago. I can't imagine running bleeding edge GPUs in a particle accelerator and getting reasonable results.
- ekianjo 1y agoDoes SpaceX also use old silicon for Starlink and other projects?
- jsheard 1y agoI believe they use relatively modern silicon in Starlink, but the nature of a constellation gives them a lot of wiggle room to route around failures.
- devops000 1y agoWhen I read something like this I fell that I am wasting my time working on a B2B SaaS.
- Townley 1y agoIt sounds like their vision for space-based data centers presupposes nearly-free energy costs, delivered via a colossal solar farm made possible by falling launch costs. Temporarily putting aside (extremely fair) feasibility questions around those two pre-requisites, data centers are a not-bad choice for things to do with unlimited space energy. Aluminum smelting or growing food are the two I’d think of otherwise, and neither of those can have inputs/outputs beamed to a global network of high-bandwidth satellites.
- gbear605 1y agoSolar energy isn’t that much more efficient in Earth orbit than on Earth - maybe twice as efficient. That sounds nice, but you’re saving half of your solar panel cost while massively increasing every other cost.
- mplanchard 1y agoThe one benefit is being able to be in a synchronous orbit with the sun, so you don’t have to contend with night. However, that’s just another ~doubling of efficiency, which I think still nowhere near makes up for the additional costs.
- DrillShopper 1y agoIt also makes the cooling problem more difficult.
- mplanchard 1y agoYeah, it seems like the cooling is pretty much the number one implausible thing among a raft of implausible things
- mark242 1y agoAnd what happens to these datacenters when the underlying GPU tech becomes obsolete within 2-3 years?
- Bedon292 1y agoI would imagine you could launch a new rack, dump the old one, and connect the new one to the existing solar / cooling array. Hopefully with some sort of re-entry and recycling plan for the old one. The sheer size the arrays are going to need to be feel like they are going to be the more important part of it.
- twic 1y agoSell them on as kinetic weapons.
- vonneumannstan 1y agoUnless they've figured out some impressive cooling tech, which I would expect would be worth more than the rest of their company combined, then this is pretty much DoA. "More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space" would indeed be useful if you had a nice medium to radiate into. It turns out that thermal radiation is incredibly poor into the vacuum of space lol.
- amluto 1y agoSpace (with a sunshade) is a nearly perfect medium into which to radiate heat, in the sense that there’s nothing better. But I agree with your general point. At 100°C, you can radiate about 1kW/m^2. That’s 1000m^2 of radiator per MW of datacenter, assuming you can operate with the radiator at 100°C. You can fudge this a bit with a heat pump (to run the radiator hotter, paying a linear-ish power penalty and gaining a fourth-power radiation benefit), but that’s expensive and that power isn’t free. Here on Earth, you can cool by conduction or evaporation, which isn’t an option in space.
- godelski 1y ago> Space (with a sunshade) is a nearly perfect medium into which to radiate heat, in the sense that there’s nothing better. There is radiation but zero convection. As anyone with an oven or PC will tell you, even a very tiny fan makes a big difference in the ability to dump heat. We're not putting our PCs into vacuum chambers for a good reason. A small fan in your oven not only makes for more consistent heating in your food, but it requires less power
- FinnKuhn 1y agoI guess you could cool by conduction in space if you build it on the moon?
- shantara 1y agoScott Manley has published a video a few months ago explaining why putting data centers in space is an absolutely terrible idea. Lumen Orbit, the company mentioned, is a former name of Starcloud. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew
- serjester 1y agoVery ambitious but it seems futile if you’re not building the rockets yourself. Personally I’m more bullish on figuring out how to use analog chips to train models.
- ianhowson 1y agoI had a good laugh. - You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price. - You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet. - You need a heat transport medium to move heat into your massive radiator. Either you use water or you use air or you use heatpipes (metal). You have to pay for the cost and weight and launch expense. This is probably half the weight of the rack and I haven't bothered to do the math about how you transport heat into a 500 foot solar sail. - Let's not even talk about how you need to colocate multiple other racks for compute and storage. There aren't any 1TBps orbital link technologies. - Rad shielding? It doesn't work, but I'll let this slide; it seems like the least problematic part of the proposal. - 15 year lifetime? GPUs are obsolete after 12 months. I don't want to be the guy who shoots stuff down just for fun, but this doesn't even pass the sniff test. Maybe you can get 10x cheaper power and cooling in space. Still doesn't work.
- dang 1y agoTheir whitepaper (https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf) had a thread last fall: We should train AI in space [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41478241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41478241 - Sept 2024 (93 comments) A bit more here: Lumen Orbit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790424 - Jan 2025 (2 comments) VCs wanted to get into Lumen Orbit's $11M seed round - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518284 - Dec 2024 (2 comments)
- archagon 1y agoAs an aside, how did the description text ("https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf") get added to a link post? Whenever I've tried in the past, my text got splatted into a comment. Was this mod intervention?
- dang 1y agoYes. I've been experimenting with doing more of that lately. It's a bit of testing the waters toward what proper URL aggregation might look like. By "URL aggregation" I mean grouping together a bunch of URLs for a story, rather than just one link per submission.
- MattSteelblade 1y agoThis doesn't pass the sniff test. Please, show me the napkin math where this remotely adds up.
- niek_pas 1y agoI miss when tech was exciting
- thrance 1y ago[flagged]
- dang 1y agoOk, but could you please follow HN's guidelines when posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? They include: "Please don't fulminate." "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
- entangledqubit 1y agoMicrosoft had/has the Natick project which was an undersea data center testbed which allegedly had a bunch of benefits. That doesn't seem to have gone anywhere - or at least isn't really scaling up. I'd imagine the ongoing operational costs of space are worse than the ocean? To me, the cost estimates seem a bit off and conflate capital with running costs. The main benefit for space at the moment seems to be sidestepping terrestrial regulations.
- aylmao 1y ago> Microsoft had/has the Natick project which was an undersea data center testbed which allegedly had a bunch of benefits. That doesn't seem to have gone anywhere - or at least isn't really scaling up. I think at the core of this there's a risk analysis. At one point I briefly worked in a team in charge of a company's servers, and there were plenty of stories of things gone wrong enough that someone had to drive or fly to the datacenter. These company's datacenters were named after the closest airport for this reason, iirc. A little optimization in case things went very wrong; you always knew where you'd have to fly in to. Even if an undersea data center could potentially yield cost benefits, it's also significantly riskier in case something goes wrong. How long would it take to physically access a machine? Do you have to bring down other machines to access it? And at scale, things tend to always go wrong. To comment on the original post, needless to say this is even more complicated, costly and untimely in space.
- twic 1y agoUndersea doesn't have to mean in the middle of the ocean. Slap one downstream of one of the caissons of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
- aylmao 1y agoIt doesn't have to be in the middle of the ocean to be less accessible than an on-ground data-center. Even if it's in a giant pool next to an any existing data-center— accessing a machine that's underwater probably takes longer and is more likely to affect the operation of other machines than if it were on dry land.
- WhitneyLand 1y agoSuggest changing the elevator pitch text - it’s never going to make sense to train a frontier model in space. In our lifetime at least.
- varunneal 1y agoI'll take the long side on that bet
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoI'm not an engineer, so maybe I'm wrong, but isn't cooling famously difficult in space?
- godelski 1y agoYes. Also, so is heating. When you're on the sun side, everything is too hot and it is hard to cool. You can do direct cooling, such as water cooling, but you have no radiator to dump the heat to... When you're in the shadow of the sun you have the opposite problem. Things are way too cold. Cold enough normal electronics can fail. For reference, the ISS can fluctuate between -250F and 250F. I'm willing to bet that it is easier to deal with the issues of salt water than it is to deal with the heating and cooling issues combined with difficulty to manually access problems presented by space. Price per pound into orbit is still quite expensive...
- Glyptodon 1y agoDoes abundant cooling in space mean there's a better way to radiate away heat than on Earth or just that the heat doesn't contribute to heating up Earth or something more complicated? (Asking because I thought cooling was a big problem in space.)
- settsu 1y agoI guess since we decided Idiocracy was aspirational, why not Wall-E as well. /s (kinda but maybe not really...)
- IAmGraydon 1y agoThese venture capital scams are getting more and more creative...
- arp242 1y agoReading the paper this sounds like space Theranos. If they start producing results then I'd double check to make sure it's not just calculated on regular data centres and that they're just pretending its from their space stations. Aside from the technical concerns already raised in other comments, I'm also not sure we really want all this private for-profit usage of earth's orbit. The orbital environment is already somewhat congested and people have already been raising concerns about it. There is the potential for it all to spectacularly blow up in our faces and become so polluted that we won't be able to do many launches at all.
- bitmasher9 1y agoPrivate use of previous public resources has had mixed success, but it feels like leaving space to the public sector will doom us to being Terran bound forever.
- aunetx 1y agoI don't see the problem in that to be honest... Especially if the other solution would be allowing private companies to take over our (shared) orbit, meteorites, and -- continuing the trend -- planets for themselves to profit. If it seems overly pessimistic, we can just look at how our own planet's ressources are shared...
- arp242 1y agoI don't know what the best solution is to be honest, but a wild west where improbable VC-funded nonsense is flung in to orbit isn't it. Leaving it only to the public sector is the other extreme end of course, and I'm not advocating for that either.
- conn10mfan 1y agothe private sector made it to the moon 56 years after the public sector it's going to take the management of our shared resources and spaces (orbit) for instance to leave earth, and this becomes especially important as Kessler syndrome risk rises with increasing debris in orbit private companies launching without public oversight and controls are a recipe for cluttering earth's orbit and leaving us earth-bound for far into the future (same if the public sector launches without care but that seems less likely imo) Kessler Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- echoangle 1y agoI’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost when sending a datacenter to space except launch cost and shielding? Building a server farm on earth is the same price as building a satellite you can launch on a rocket as long as you use the same computers?
- jackmottatx 1y ago[dead]
- slashdev 1y agoI agree, this is makes no sense at all. Can I take the other side of this investment? Like an angel funding round, but selling short?
- debatem1 1y agoIf you figure out how to do this I will invest in your fund.
- rjbwork 1y agoGotta figure out how to sell these guys shovels
- rogerrogerr 1y agoIf someone figured out how to provide a way to bet against startups… could we say they’re selling grave shovels?
- echelon 1y agoA futures market for startup equity where you can short sell would be wild. Otherwise when the big firms go public (A16Z etc.), options trading on their stock.
- bitmasher9 1y agoHow do they plan on addressing the solar radiation issue? What is the solar flare risk? A CDN for Starlink customers is probably the first use case for servers in space, not training GPT6, which will be a big enough project on familiar territory.
- ryandamm 1y agoCooling in space was covered by XKCD's Randall Munroe in pretty entertaining detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUBRd1O2dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUBRd1O2dU TL;DR... cooling in space isn't passive, you're on the "inside" of an enormous vacuum flask. And radiative coupling with space is possible from the ground, if that's what you're interested in: https://www.skycoolsystems.com https://www.skycoolsystems.com But god bless crazy entrepreneurs. Don't ask whether we can, definitely don't ask if we should, just ask whether it makes for good headlines...
- floathub 1y agoCanadian north makes sense (very cheap electricity, ridiculously easy heat management). Space? I really don't get it.
- crispinb 1y agoYcombinator has one legitimate function: dissipating excess looted wealth.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BonoboIO 1y agoThis has to be one of the dumbest ideas I've seen posted here. Just think about the sheer effort required to dump 1 BILLION watts of waste heat into space - the engineering challenges alone make this completely impractical. Compared to this, Theranos actually looks like a solid investment. At least Holmes had working demos and big-name backers before it all fell apart. This doesn't even pass the basic smell test.
- ryandamm 1y agoAll these comments are acting like this is a major problem with VCs in general. Is this not a major problem with YC, specifically? Our beloved orange site funded and accelerated these guys.
- fintler 1y agoNot to be confused with StarTree Cloud: https://startree.ai/products/startree-cloud https://startree.ai/products/startree-cloud
- kevinelliott 1y agoLooks interesting. Thanks for sharing.
- GolfPopper 1y agoThe use-case for this is not anything technical, it's putting your data center outside of any jurisdiction.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe Sealand folks found rapidly that “outside any jurisdiction” also means “not protected by one”.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thot_experiment 1y ago> passive cooling what the actual fuck? my boys joseph and ludwig would like to have a word with y'all in ideal conditions, your gpu putting out 600W will need about a square meter facing deep space to keep it at 80c, this idea is absurd on first principles alone, maybe if you have heat pumps you can push this but then you're dealing with on orbit fluid loops that you can't maintain, as i said, what the fuck?
- stephenhandley 1y ago[flagged]
- jadbox 1y agoI guess it would be heat pollution at the poles that may contribute to global climate change if we start building immense data centers there.
- stephenhandley 1y agoI believe they'd mainly need to be strategic about where and how deep they were radiating into the surface since there wouldn't be atmosphere that would trap heat.
- Etheryte 1y agoPlease don't litter HN with LLM generated slop. Each and every one of us here is more than capable of doing that themselves if they please. The value of HN is the human discussion.
- stephenhandley 1y ago[flagged]
- mplanchard 1y agoI thought your question was interesting. The ChatGPT quote was not. If I want to know what an LLM “thinks”, I can ask it. I have more respect for and am more interested in reading people’s thoughts than machine output. I do appreciate your at least labeling at such, so I could skip over it.
- stephenhandley 1y agoIf you're under the impression that all the content on here is 100% human, that's probably slightly optimistic, and the reason why I labeled it explicitly rather than regurgitating / rewording. That said, I'd rather read GPT output than skim the meta-discussion that ruins so many HN threads. Totally stoked that we're now contributing to that rather than talking about the actual content.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- troymc 1y agoIt might make more sense to put data centers on the Moon. It's fairly close, about 1.3 light seconds away. You wouldn't use it for anything realtime, but it would be fine for long AI training jobs. You could bury the servers underground to shield them from cosmic rays. That would also be good for any people living there. You could get power from solar panels on peaks near the poles that get light almost all the time. For example, some ridges around Shackleton Crater are sunlit up to ~90% of the time, with short periods of darkness. Use batteries to smooth out the power supply. For heating and cooling, just use the standard techniques. It's not easy, but it's a solved problem. As a bonus, near the poles, the temperature extremes aren't as bad as at the equator. You could also sell tickets to tourists. People will pay to see the darndest things.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 1y agoIs this an elaborate joke? I believe so given all the very real physical problems with this, but “GPT-6” training was what pushed it undoubtedly over the edge to pure joke.
- emmelaich 1y agoI liked "Secure contracts which incumbent hyper scalers" Not even English.
- cogogo 1y ago> able to train large models like GPT6 That is pretty amazing to say with a straight face. Whatever GPT6 may or may not ever be…
- andrepd 1y agoThis is the best piece of satirical writing that I've read in quite a long time. It's genuinely amazing, every sentence is a delight. And the Musk/Altman/Zuck quotes to start, the stupid little graphs and the "equation" at the end of page 2. I'm in stitches!
- decimalenough 1y agoFormerly known as "Lumen Orbit", or for short, "Lumon". The work is mysterious and important. Praise Kier.
- osigurdson 1y agoI feel like YC's $500K investment would last 0.25 days at most for this type of business.
- lionkor 1y agoSimply tow the data center out of the environment![1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- godelski 1y agoHow did this get funding? Seriously! There is just so much wrong and some of is trivial. > radiating primarily towards deep space, which has an average temperature of about 2.7 Kelvin or -270°C. Are they suggesting putting these things in deep space? I guess for training you can handle hours of delay time but still it is really bandwidth limited. But they say they're using solar, so I assume they ARE NOT operating in deep space but rather near Earth or maybe even on the Moon. In these locations you have to deal with cooling AND heating. On the moon you swing from -130C (LRO got down to -250C) on the dark side and 121C on the light side. The ISS swings from -160C to 120C. These are too cold for most electronics. Not to mention that these temperature swings create a lot of physical stress on parts, and we're talking about putting up up some of the smallest objects we commercially make? They will rip right off the circuit-board if you don't get it right. Not to mention that radiating into space is quite difficult. There's a reason we use convection ovens and why we put fans in our computers. It isn't about the temperature of the atmosphere nor the thermal efficiency, it is because convection is just a hell of a lot more efficient. Thermal radiation is like shedding your heat via a lightbulb. Their claim here is that they can radiate 633W/m2. For supercomputers we're talking on the order of 10s of MW of waste heat. That's 10^7! These are going to be BY FAR the largest radiators in space and going to cost tons of money for the mass alone. Not to mention the size of the solar panels they'll need... But at least they mention this one: "A 5 GW data center would require a solar array with dimensions of approximately 4 km by 4 km," These are GIGANTIC structures and far larger than anything we've put into space. > The mass of radiation shielding scales linearly with the container surface area, whereas the compute per container scales with the volume. Therefore the mass of shielding needed per compute unit decreases linearly with container size. This one really got me, because it can be sniffed out with high school physics. Density (ρ) is mass (m) divided by volume (V): m = ρV. We'll assume a sphere due to its efficient surface area. You use Δr as the shell's thickness: V = 4/3(Δr)^3 Let: m = ρV Let: V = 4/3(Δr)^3 ∴ m ∝ ρ(Δr)^3 What is linear? What is decreasing? > This effect, combined with the shielding afforded by the cooling blocks, means that radiation shielding is proportionally a much smaller concern compared to electronics on typical satellites today. Now this might be partially accurate, but it does require some very specific conditions to be true. It is quite common for spacecraft to dual purpose their cooling systems to also act as part of their radiation shielding since essentially the most important part of shielding is mass[0]. But also most spacecraft aren't giant computers in space. You're going to need extremely uniform shielding and I doubt you can efficiently design the cooling system to also be uniform. But also you have to remember that you can't shield your solar panels. To do so would prevent light from reaching them. That leads to a weird constraint here and I would not expect these machines to be meaningfully long lived. The alternative is you could go repair them, but that's expensive too. ------- I think the idea is cool and worth exploring, but given the white paper I'm not sure why anyone gave them money. The idea itself is old and there has been a lot of work done in this space (pun intended). It just seems like it is riding the hype of space and AI. Exciting things, but that can make people naive. Maybe there's more than is shown in this whitepaper and I hope investors are doing more due diligence but there's definitely a lot of red flags here. ------ https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-control/ https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont... https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-851-satellite-engineering-fall-2003/e3a84cc153960fff8d55480fe228bbcc_l23thermalcontro.pdf https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-851-satellite-engineering-fal... https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st8/tech/eaftc_tech1.php https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st8/tech/eaftc_tech1.php https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03913-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03913-w [0] I know this because I've research for NASA on radiation shields. I got multiple SBIR and STTR grants for this work. Material choices still do matter but the right material is proportional to the radiation level. But the higher the energy level, the less atomic properties matter and the more density does. You can get benefits from the electromagnetic properties of protons and electrons (beta-), but these don't help you with neutrons. That is, until after you slow these things down, which is why there is typically layering.
- theta_d 1y agoNeat, I wonder if https://star-catcher.com/ https://star-catcher.com/ could provide power.
- ww520 1y agoSpace is really good low temperature compute. It’s perfect for hosting quantum computers.
- NautilusWave 1y agoMaybe we can put the quantum computers in space too.
- dmillar 1y agoIf this and/or the policies, leadership, and mindset that enable these kinds of things interest you, I highly recommend Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. IIRC, they outline data centers in space in his utopian introduction.
- beoberha 1y agoIt feels defeating to see so much money being thrown at what is either an obvious grift or someone hoarding world changing technology. There’s a reason data centers aren’t in space… If someone has the technology to make it feasible, they are doing the world a massive disservice by not sharing it.
- jwr 1y agoI think what I like the most about this whole thing is that the term "cloud computing" (which I always thought idiotic) will now finally become somewhat more meaningful.
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- d-moon 1y ago- radhard electronics require a different sdk to maintain good seu/tid, and also require a higher layout overhead to maintain these metrics. - radhard sdks aren't offered at sota node sizes. - they are much much more expensive If they can partner with a chipmaker (AMD :^)) and use that as a way to collect some meaningful data, that would be useful at the very least.
- spinarrets 1y agoWhy couldn't you deploy all those solar panels on earth. Then you could supply the grid when you weren't training models, you could recycle your components when they got old, you wouldn't need launches, you could maintain things if they break, and sure, spend a bunch of money to figure out large radiators that could radiate heat out of the atmosphere. Be the start of a geoengineering project that is actively collecting energy and radiating it out into space while performing useful work along the way. Infrared radiation between 8 and 13 micrometers isn't absorbed by the atmosphere and exits the planet. So, why not build big infra here and if you can build powerful radiators, aim them up and away from the earth, which needs to be cooled a bit anyways!
- FridgeSeal 1y agoThanks. I hate it. Let’s definitely downplay the physics _and_ pollute orbit in service of what will no doubt be producing yet more AI slop. So good.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoEliezer Yudkowsky's take: >Presumably the real purpose of this company is to refute people who said "We'll just walk over to the superintelligence and pull the plug out", without MIRI needing to argue with them https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1831899029690839549#m https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1831899029690839549#m
- CiscoCodex 1y agoIt makes so much sense that there are many comments saying why this is a bad idea. In fact I agree with a lot if not all of these comments. However, I still have to commend how big of a dream this is and that they got some sort funding behind them. I say let big dreams possibly fail although I admit it’s not my money being spent.
- dakr 1y agoThere is a lot of handwaving going on here. The below, however, is an egregious misunderstanding of how percentages work. That, or it betrays very sloppy work. Doing it right would actually make the specific case they make stronger. "There are also potential opportunities to leverage the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is 35% faster than in a typical glass fiber." This is just wrong. The speed of light in a fiber is ~2/3 slower than in a vacuum. That means that the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster than in a fiber, not 35% (~1/3) faster!
- rajnathani 1y agoThey closed a very large seed round late last year (FKA "Lumen Orbit"): https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/24/lumen-orbit-closed-one-of-the-biggest-rounds-from-y-combinators-last-cohort/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/24/lumen-orbit-closed-one-of-...
- neuroelectron 1y agoYC jumped the shark
- singularity2001 1y agoWait this is not comedy? Is PG on holiday?
- amai 1y agoLatency?