8 ms·

Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k s

by kimixa 8mo ago

Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same. Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for many of the things AI datacenters are doing today. And that's with direct cables - using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use and complexity for the communication in the first place. Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric than in space, be it price, performance, maintainance, efficiency, ease of cooling, pollution/"trash" disposal etc. Even things like communication network connectivity would be easier, as at the amounts of money this constellation mesh would cost you could lay new fibre optic cables to build an entire new global network to anywhere on earth and have new trunk connections to every major hub. There are advantages to being in space - normally around increased visibility for wireless signals, allowing great distances to be covered at (relatively) low bandwidth. But that comes at an extreme cost. Paying that cost for a use case that simply doesn't get much advantages from those benefits is nonsense.

sandworm101 8mo ago
Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for those activities that can only be done from space. For general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the globe are full. This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will line up to give it to him.
- krisoft 8mo ago
  > Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it will run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it will in space That is clearly not true. How do you power the data center on antarctica? May i remind you it will be in the shadow of earth for half a year.
  - adrianN 8mo ago
    A tanker full of LNG and a turbine would probably work.
    - multiplegeorges 8mo ago
      Kinda like the ones they are already burning in Starship to put these in space in the first place. Anywhere on earth is better than space for this application.
  - idontwantthis 8mo ago
    Space is so expensive that you can power it pretty much any way you want and it will be cheaper. Nuclear reactor, LNG, batteries (truck them in and out if you have to). Hell, space based solar and beam it down. Why would there ever be an advantage to putting the compute in space?
    - cmsj 8mo ago
      Get those penguins doing something productive for once, put them on treadmills!
      - idontwantthis 8mo ago
        Or burn them in a furnace. Pretty much any way you can think of to accomplish something on earth, is vastly cheaper, easier, and faster than doing it in space.
  - sandworm101 8mo ago
    Then you put another in the high north. Two, or six, is still cheaper than one in orbit.
  - triceratops 8mo ago
    > How do you power the data center on antarctica? Nuclear power plant?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 8mo ago
- kimixa 8mo ago
  Yup - my example of the Sahara wasn't really a specific suggestion, so much as an example of "The Most Inconvenient Inhospitable part of the earth's surface is still much better than space for these use cases". This isn't star trek, the world doesn't match sci-fi. It's like his "Mars Colony" junk - and people lap it up, keeping him in the news (in a not explicitly negative light - unlike some recent stories....)
abalone 8mo ago
> using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use Space changes this. Laser based optical links offer bandwidth of 100 - 1000 Gbps with much lower power consumption than radio based links. They are more feasible in orbit due to the lack of interference and fogging. > Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric This is not true for the power generation aspect (which is the main motivation for orbital TPUs). Desert solar is a hard problem due to the need for a water supply to keep the panels clear of dust. Also the cooling problem is greatly exacerbated.
- Retric 8mo ago
  You don’t need to do anything to keep panels with a significant angle clear of dust in deserts. The Sahara is near the equator but you can stow panels at night and let the wind do its thing. The lack of launch costs more than offset the need for extra panels and batteries.
  - abalone 8mo ago
    What’s your source for that claim? Soiling is a massive problem for desert solar, causing as high as 50% efficiency loss in the Middle East.[1] [1] https://www.nlr.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-studying-solar-try-solving-a-dusty-problem https://www.nlr.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-stu...
    - Retric 8mo ago
      A relevant quote from that article. “The reason I concentrate my research on these urban environments is because the composition of soiling is completely different,” said Toth, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental engineering at the University of Colorado who has worked at NREL since 2017. “We have more fine particles that are these stickier particles that could contribute to much different surface chemistry on the module and different soiling. In the desert, you don’t have as much of the surface chemistry come into play.”
ineedasername 8mo ago
Why would they bother to build space data center in such monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2 satellite. That satellite size is large enough to encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither does it have to be countless objects kilometers apart from each other beaming data wirelessly. A few dozen wired as a cluster is much more than sufficient to avoid incurring any more bandwidth penalties on server-to-server communication with correlated work loads than we already have on earth for most needs. Of course this doesn't solve the myriad problems, but it does put dissipation squarely in the category of "we've solved similar problems". I agree there's still no good reason to actually do this unless there's a use for all that compute out there in orbit, but that too is happening with immense growth and demand expected for increased pharmaceutical research and various manufacturing capabilities that require low/no gravity.
- bigbuppo 8mo ago
  Not just a 42U rack, but a 42U rack that needs one hundred thousand watts of power, and it also needs to be able to remove one hundred thousand watts of heat out of the rack, and then it needs to dump that one hundred thousand watts of heat into space.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 8mo ago
    Hrrm. Lemme glassballit... Imagine a liquid which can be electrically charged, and has a low boiling point. (Ask 3M/DuPont/BASF/Bayer... - context 'immersion cooling') Attach heat-pipes with that stuff to the chips as is common now, or go the direct route via substrate-embedded microfluidics, as is thought of at the moment. Radiate the shit out of it by spraying it into the vacuum, dispersing into the finest mist with highest possible surface, funnel the frozen mist back in after some distance, by electrostatic and/or electromagnetic means. Repeat. Flow as you go.
    - amluto 8mo ago
      > Radiate the shit out of it by spraying it into the vacuum, dispersing into the finest mist with highest possible surface, funnel the frozen mist back in after some distance, by electrostatic and/or electromagnetic means. Repeat. Flow as you go. Even if that worked, you don’t gain much. It’s not the local surface area that matters — it’s the global surface. A device confined within a 20m radius sphere can radiate no more heat than a plain black sphere of the same radius. There are only two ways to cheat this. First, you can run hotter. But a heat pump needs power, and you need to get that power from somewhere, and you need to dissipate that power too. But you can at least run your chips as hot as they will tolerate. Second is things like lasers or radio transmitters, but those are producing non-thermal output, which is actually worse at cooling. At the end of the day, you have only two variables to play with: the effective radiating surface temperature and the temperature of the blackbody radiation you emit.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

by kimixa 8mo ago

sandworm101 8mo ago

Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for those activities that can only be done from space. For general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the globe are full. This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will line up to give it to him.

krisoft 8mo ago
> Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it will run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it will in space That is clearly not true. How do you power the data center on antarctica? May i remind you it will be in the shadow of earth for half a year.
- adrianN 8mo ago
  A tanker full of LNG and a turbine would probably work.
  - multiplegeorges 8mo ago
    Kinda like the ones they are already burning in Starship to put these in space in the first place. Anywhere on earth is better than space for this application.
- idontwantthis 8mo ago
  Space is so expensive that you can power it pretty much any way you want and it will be cheaper. Nuclear reactor, LNG, batteries (truck them in and out if you have to). Hell, space based solar and beam it down. Why would there ever be an advantage to putting the compute in space?
  - cmsj 8mo ago
    Get those penguins doing something productive for once, put them on treadmills!
    - idontwantthis 8mo ago
      Or burn them in a furnace. Pretty much any way you can think of to accomplish something on earth, is vastly cheaper, easier, and faster than doing it in space.
- sandworm101 8mo ago
  Then you put another in the high north. Two, or six, is still cheaper than one in orbit.
- triceratops 8mo ago
  > How do you power the data center on antarctica? Nuclear power plant?
- LargoLasskhyfv 8mo ago
kimixa 8mo ago
Yup - my example of the Sahara wasn't really a specific suggestion, so much as an example of "The Most Inconvenient Inhospitable part of the earth's surface is still much better than space for these use cases". This isn't star trek, the world doesn't match sci-fi. It's like his "Mars Colony" junk - and people lap it up, keeping him in the news (in a not explicitly negative light - unlike some recent stories....)

abalone 8mo ago

> using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use Space changes this. Laser based optical links offer bandwidth of 100 - 1000 Gbps with much lower power consumption than radio based links. They are more feasible in orbit due to the lack of interference and fogging. > Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric This is not true for the power generation aspect (which is the main motivation for orbital TPUs). Desert solar is a hard problem due to the need for a water supply to keep the panels clear of dust. Also the cooling problem is greatly exacerbated.

Retric 8mo ago
You don’t need to do anything to keep panels with a significant angle clear of dust in deserts. The Sahara is near the equator but you can stow panels at night and let the wind do its thing. The lack of launch costs more than offset the need for extra panels and batteries.
- abalone 8mo ago
  What’s your source for that claim? Soiling is a massive problem for desert solar, causing as high as 50% efficiency loss in the Middle East.[1] [1] https://www.nlr.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-studying-solar-try-solving-a-dusty-problem https://www.nlr.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-stu...
  - Retric 8mo ago
    A relevant quote from that article. “The reason I concentrate my research on these urban environments is because the composition of soiling is completely different,” said Toth, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental engineering at the University of Colorado who has worked at NREL since 2017. “We have more fine particles that are these stickier particles that could contribute to much different surface chemistry on the module and different soiling. In the desert, you don’t have as much of the surface chemistry come into play.”

ineedasername 8mo ago

Why would they bother to build space data center in such monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2 satellite. That satellite size is large enough to encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither does it have to be countless objects kilometers apart from each other beaming data wirelessly. A few dozen wired as a cluster is much more than sufficient to avoid incurring any more bandwidth penalties on server-to-server communication with correlated work loads than we already have on earth for most needs. Of course this doesn't solve the myriad problems, but it does put dissipation squarely in the category of "we've solved similar problems". I agree there's still no good reason to actually do this unless there's a use for all that compute out there in orbit, but that too is happening with immense growth and demand expected for increased pharmaceutical research and various manufacturing capabilities that require low/no gravity.

bigbuppo 8mo ago
Not just a 42U rack, but a 42U rack that needs one hundred thousand watts of power, and it also needs to be able to remove one hundred thousand watts of heat out of the rack, and then it needs to dump that one hundred thousand watts of heat into space.
- LargoLasskhyfv 8mo ago
  Hrrm. Lemme glassballit... Imagine a liquid which can be electrically charged, and has a low boiling point. (Ask 3M/DuPont/BASF/Bayer... - context 'immersion cooling') Attach heat-pipes with that stuff to the chips as is common now, or go the direct route via substrate-embedded microfluidics, as is thought of at the moment. Radiate the shit out of it by spraying it into the vacuum, dispersing into the finest mist with highest possible surface, funnel the frozen mist back in after some distance, by electrostatic and/or electromagnetic means. Repeat. Flow as you go.
  - amluto 8mo ago
    > Radiate the shit out of it by spraying it into the vacuum, dispersing into the finest mist with highest possible surface, funnel the frozen mist back in after some distance, by electrostatic and/or electromagnetic means. Repeat. Flow as you go. Even if that worked, you don’t gain much. It’s not the local surface area that matters — it’s the global surface. A device confined within a 20m radius sphere can radiate no more heat than a plain black sphere of the same radius. There are only two ways to cheat this. First, you can run hotter. But a heat pump needs power, and you need to get that power from somewhere, and you need to dissipate that power too. But you can at least run your chips as hot as they will tolerate. Second is things like lasers or radio transmitters, but those are producing non-thermal output, which is actually worse at cooling. At the end of the day, you have only two variables to play with: the effective radiating surface temperature and the temperature of the blackbody radiation you emit.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]