4 ms·

Direct Current Data Centers

66 points by jk_tech 8mo ago

Havoc 8mo ago
Slightly OT, but I see the Chinese are talking about space DCs now too which would suggest they reckon it could work too. (Unlike me and others here)
- hhh 8mo ago
  datacenters in space are a great way to claim vast amount of viable orbit space for a stupid project to eventually sell the slot for something else when it’s rarer.
  - alansaber 8mo ago
    This is basically the same argument made by people in domain-specific language models but rather than physical space (in space) it's mind-share, so actually your argument makes more sense? lol.
- Galanwe 8mo ago
  Not a physician, but wouldn't space be terrible for heat dissipation?
  - ampersandwhich 8mo ago
    Also not a rocket surgeon, but to my understanding, modern satellites already have solar panels and radiators that account for the system's overall energy absorption and dissipation in low Earth orbit [1]. Therefore, plugging a supercomputer into the solar array instead of another instrument would likely not affect the overall heat profile meaningfully. Most energy in LEO is ultimately derived from solar irradiance and passes through the spacecraft regardless of internal usage. That said, take this with a grain of salt due to the aforementioned lack of astrochirurgical bona fides. Edit: Added some primary sources [2][3][4], including an interactive website by Andrew McCalip which lets you play around with the unit economics of orbital 'datacenters' at various price points [4]. [1] https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI [2] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p... [3] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf [4] https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
  - preisschild 8mo ago
    Yes, you would need massive amounts of radiators
    - Incipient 8mo ago
      And solar panels. I don't think we can put 1GW+ of solar panels into orbit?
- alansaber 8mo ago
  I think it's more of a classic mirror move where IF they do work, they're at danger of falling behind.
  - xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
    Falling behind? No, they're shadowing us, waiting until we make a mistake.
- bgnn 8mo ago
  Except none of that data center grade chips can work in the space. No GPUs, no memory, no SSD. They are not radiation-hardened (rad-hard). Rad-hard chips generally cost an oder of magnitude or more compared to normal commercial chips, and they are in general an order of magnitude less complex, plus they operate much lower frequencies. Data centers in space is straight up stupid.
- numpad0 8mo ago
  It can't work if you're launching from Earth. Datacenters are too heavy with or without the solar and radiator panels. If you could make those panels and chips on the Moon, Deimos, Mars, high Jupiter, wherever, then space datacenters can totally work.
ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
Why are we wasting resources on toy chatbots?
- dang 8mo ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
  Borrowing state money that ultimately indentures a country with over-engineered massive boondoggle projects. That regulatory capture con strangled more emerging economies than most like to admit. =3 "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)
  - gruez 8mo ago
    >Borrowing state money that ultimately indentures a country with over-engineered massive boondoggle projects. The datacenters of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. are primarily funded by the government?
    - Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
      Do they get tax breaks, subsidy, loan deals, and naive non-voting investor money? My point was these folks never gamble with their own cash from revenue. It is always the tax payer that ends up holding the gamblers debts. =3 https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/
      - gruez 8mo ago
        >Do they get tax breaks The government also has "tax breaks" for certain foods and my 401k. Does that make my evening meal and retirement plan "state money funded" as well? > loan deals, and naive non-voting investor money? Well?
hambes 8mo ago
it is difficult to comprehend for me that soneone spends all this time thinking through and calculating how to harness as much energy as possible and then wants to use it for large language models instead of something useful, like food production, communication, transport or any other way of satisfying actual human material needs. what weird priorities.
- dan-robertson 8mo ago
  I don’t think that’s a great description of what’s going on here. I think there are two things: 1. The actual thing the authors spend a lot of time thinking about seems to be more generally how to make good use of solar power for things that people find valuable – synthetic fuels desalination, etc – and the implications of the sun only shining some of the time – maybe you don’t want to pay more for more efficient systems as then you want steady power which is more expensive. 2. I think the blog post is a bit of a response to lots of public discussion about AI data centres. IMO seems better to see what someone who thinks a lot about energy has to say than eg, a government suggestion that you delete old pictures to reduce water consumption.
- stingraycharles 8mo ago
  Sometimes (often) solving the problem is the most fun part, regardless of how it’s used. The scale of AI energy consumption is quite unique from what I heard, and there’s a lot of money flowing into that direction. So that seems to me a decent reason to think about that. I haven’t heard yet that food production is constrained by these kind of things. It appears to make that you’re just taking a cheap jab at AI.
  - alansaber 8mo ago
    Exactly this, you need a (big) problem to motivate people to actually take a serious jab at a (big) new idea
- hjoutfbkfd 8mo ago
  if anything we are producing too much food and what communications you find lacking?
bob1029 8mo ago
From a purely engineering perspective I think it becomes difficult to argue with the gas turbine once you get into the gigawatt class of data center. The amount of land required for this much solar is not to be understated. In many practical scenarios the solar array would need to be located a distance away from the actual data center. This implies transmission infrastructure which is often the hardest part of any electrical engineering project. You can put a gigawatt of N+1 generation on a 50 acre site with gas. It's dispatchable 24/7/365 and you can store energy for pennies on the dollar at incredible scale. Having both forms of generation available at the same time is the best solution. Once you put a data center on the grid you can mix the fuel however you want upstream. This should be the ultimate goal and I believe it is for all current AI projects. I am not aware of any data center builds that intend to operate on parking lot generators indefinitely.
- dan-robertson 8mo ago
  For inference you don’t need gpus to be clustered together as much (generally training has lots of synchronisation steps so you can be bottlenecked on that instead of ‘real’ work) as they can handle separate tasks in parallel. But maybe other economies of scale still make you want to put them together (and therefore on average further from the power). I guess there was a bit of thought about transmission with the reference to high voltages. Another interesting thing: batteries allow you to reduce the needed capacity for transmission lines – if you have batteries near generation and then transmit power at a lower maximum, same average rate than if you only have batteries near use, you can more efficiently use the available transmission. I guess the main reason for gas to be a problem is if you can’t get new generation (eg lack of turbines).
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- hjoutfbkfd 8mo ago
  they are talking about covering the desert with solar panels. why would you not put the data center in the middle of it?
  - 8mo ago
phtrivier 8mo ago
I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers. Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used) Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks) He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?
- bgnn 8mo ago
  Fiber is much much less of a cost and technical challenge compared to transfering GWs of power. Unless the customer cannot handle up to 100ms latency, it's totally logical to place the data centers close to the power source, or vice versa (power source close to the data center).
jabl 8mo ago
To comment on using direct current rather than alternating current, at least NVIDIA is working on 800VDC: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architecture-will-power-the-next-generation-of-ai-factories/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec... https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/building-the-800-vdc-ecosystem-for-efficient-scalable-ai-factories/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/building-the-800-vdc-ecosy... More generally, a bunch of the electrical industry heavyweights are involved in a standard for DC microgrids called Current/OS: https://currentos.org/ https://currentos.org/ There are certainly advantages to DC vs AC, but there's of course a huge amount of sunken cost in contemporary AC networks.
- boulos 8mo ago
  IIRC, Google contributed +-400 racks last year to Open Compute: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/enabling-1-mw-it-racks-and-liquid-cooling-at-ocp-emea-summit https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/enabling-1-mw-i...

66 points by jk_tech 8mo ago

Havoc 8mo ago

Slightly OT, but I see the Chinese are talking about space DCs now too which would suggest they reckon it could work too. (Unlike me and others here)

hhh 8mo ago
datacenters in space are a great way to claim vast amount of viable orbit space for a stupid project to eventually sell the slot for something else when it’s rarer.
- alansaber 8mo ago
  This is basically the same argument made by people in domain-specific language models but rather than physical space (in space) it's mind-share, so actually your argument makes more sense? lol.
Galanwe 8mo ago
Not a physician, but wouldn't space be terrible for heat dissipation?
- ampersandwhich 8mo ago
  Also not a rocket surgeon, but to my understanding, modern satellites already have solar panels and radiators that account for the system's overall energy absorption and dissipation in low Earth orbit [1]. Therefore, plugging a supercomputer into the solar array instead of another instrument would likely not affect the overall heat profile meaningfully. Most energy in LEO is ultimately derived from solar irradiance and passes through the spacecraft regardless of internal usage. That said, take this with a grain of salt due to the aforementioned lack of astrochirurgical bona fides. Edit: Added some primary sources [2][3][4], including an interactive website by Andrew McCalip which lets you play around with the unit economics of orbital 'datacenters' at various price points [4]. [1] https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI [2] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p... [3] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf [4] https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- preisschild 8mo ago
  Yes, you would need massive amounts of radiators
  - Incipient 8mo ago
    And solar panels. I don't think we can put 1GW+ of solar panels into orbit?
alansaber 8mo ago
I think it's more of a classic mirror move where IF they do work, they're at danger of falling behind.
- xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
  Falling behind? No, they're shadowing us, waiting until we make a mistake.
bgnn 8mo ago
Except none of that data center grade chips can work in the space. No GPUs, no memory, no SSD. They are not radiation-hardened (rad-hard). Rad-hard chips generally cost an oder of magnitude or more compared to normal commercial chips, and they are in general an order of magnitude less complex, plus they operate much lower frequencies. Data centers in space is straight up stupid.
numpad0 8mo ago
It can't work if you're launching from Earth. Datacenters are too heavy with or without the solar and radiator panels. If you could make those panels and chips on the Moon, Deimos, Mars, high Jupiter, wherever, then space datacenters can totally work.

ErroneousBosh 8mo ago

Why are we wasting resources on toy chatbots?

dang 8mo ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
Borrowing state money that ultimately indentures a country with over-engineered massive boondoggle projects. That regulatory capture con strangled more emerging economies than most like to admit. =3 "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)
- gruez 8mo ago
  >Borrowing state money that ultimately indentures a country with over-engineered massive boondoggle projects. The datacenters of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. are primarily funded by the government?
  - Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
    Do they get tax breaks, subsidy, loan deals, and naive non-voting investor money? My point was these folks never gamble with their own cash from revenue. It is always the tax payer that ends up holding the gamblers debts. =3 https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/
    - gruez 8mo ago
      >Do they get tax breaks The government also has "tax breaks" for certain foods and my 401k. Does that make my evening meal and retirement plan "state money funded" as well? > loan deals, and naive non-voting investor money? Well?

hambes 8mo ago

it is difficult to comprehend for me that soneone spends all this time thinking through and calculating how to harness as much energy as possible and then wants to use it for large language models instead of something useful, like food production, communication, transport or any other way of satisfying actual human material needs. what weird priorities.

dan-robertson 8mo ago
I don’t think that’s a great description of what’s going on here. I think there are two things: 1. The actual thing the authors spend a lot of time thinking about seems to be more generally how to make good use of solar power for things that people find valuable – synthetic fuels desalination, etc – and the implications of the sun only shining some of the time – maybe you don’t want to pay more for more efficient systems as then you want steady power which is more expensive. 2. I think the blog post is a bit of a response to lots of public discussion about AI data centres. IMO seems better to see what someone who thinks a lot about energy has to say than eg, a government suggestion that you delete old pictures to reduce water consumption.
stingraycharles 8mo ago
Sometimes (often) solving the problem is the most fun part, regardless of how it’s used. The scale of AI energy consumption is quite unique from what I heard, and there’s a lot of money flowing into that direction. So that seems to me a decent reason to think about that. I haven’t heard yet that food production is constrained by these kind of things. It appears to make that you’re just taking a cheap jab at AI.
- alansaber 8mo ago
  Exactly this, you need a (big) problem to motivate people to actually take a serious jab at a (big) new idea
hjoutfbkfd 8mo ago
if anything we are producing too much food and what communications you find lacking?

bob1029 8mo ago

From a purely engineering perspective I think it becomes difficult to argue with the gas turbine once you get into the gigawatt class of data center. The amount of land required for this much solar is not to be understated. In many practical scenarios the solar array would need to be located a distance away from the actual data center. This implies transmission infrastructure which is often the hardest part of any electrical engineering project. You can put a gigawatt of N+1 generation on a 50 acre site with gas. It's dispatchable 24/7/365 and you can store energy for pennies on the dollar at incredible scale. Having both forms of generation available at the same time is the best solution. Once you put a data center on the grid you can mix the fuel however you want upstream. This should be the ultimate goal and I believe it is for all current AI projects. I am not aware of any data center builds that intend to operate on parking lot generators indefinitely.

dan-robertson 8mo ago
For inference you don’t need gpus to be clustered together as much (generally training has lots of synchronisation steps so you can be bottlenecked on that instead of ‘real’ work) as they can handle separate tasks in parallel. But maybe other economies of scale still make you want to put them together (and therefore on average further from the power). I guess there was a bit of thought about transmission with the reference to high voltages. Another interesting thing: batteries allow you to reduce the needed capacity for transmission lines – if you have batteries near generation and then transmit power at a lower maximum, same average rate than if you only have batteries near use, you can more efficiently use the available transmission. I guess the main reason for gas to be a problem is if you can’t get new generation (eg lack of turbines).
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
hjoutfbkfd 8mo ago
they are talking about covering the desert with solar panels. why would you not put the data center in the middle of it?
- 8mo ago

phtrivier 8mo ago

I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers. Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used) Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks) He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?

bgnn 8mo ago
Fiber is much much less of a cost and technical challenge compared to transfering GWs of power. Unless the customer cannot handle up to 100ms latency, it's totally logical to place the data centers close to the power source, or vice versa (power source close to the data center).

jabl 8mo ago

To comment on using direct current rather than alternating current, at least NVIDIA is working on 800VDC: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architecture-will-power-the-next-generation-of-ai-factories/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec... https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/building-the-800-vdc-ecosystem-for-efficient-scalable-ai-factories/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/building-the-800-vdc-ecosy... More generally, a bunch of the electrical industry heavyweights are involved in a standard for DC microgrids called Current/OS: https://currentos.org/ https://currentos.org/ There are certainly advantages to DC vs AC, but there's of course a huge amount of sunken cost in contemporary AC networks.

boulos 8mo ago
IIRC, Google contributed +-400 racks last year to Open Compute: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/enabling-1-mw-it-racks-and-liquid-cooling-at-ocp-emea-summit https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/enabling-1-mw-i...