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The discourse on this topic is at the point where I have no idea if people are serious or satirical. Please tell me you don’t seriously believe data centers in

by dgellow 6mo ago

The discourse on this topic is at the point where I have no idea if people are serious or satirical. Please tell me you don’t seriously believe data centers in spaces is a realistic idea

trhway 6mo ago
I don't "believe". I'm arithmetically sure that it is going to happen, and it will beat the ground based on pretty much all metrics. Some of my comments with napkin numbers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 Just a very rough primitive illustration - a land for a house in SV is like a $1M, and putting a 10 ton house into space at $100/kg - $1M. Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis. And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism. Defense is one of the most important sovereign aspects, and upon acquiring it the transnationals will be able to acquire pretty fast the other sovereign aspects. Like enforcement of the Criminal Code of the Mars Colony - again pretty rough primitive illustration of course. The feudal Europe emerged on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and in our world the new order will be emerging faster on the outskirts (i.e. where reach and strength of the existing order is weaker), the space being one such "outskirts" dimension and the AI/hypercompute virtual world being the other. To the commenter below with reddit link : they use human env temp for heat radiation estimate. That lowers the numbers and requires AC equipment. Ie they estimate space station, not datacenter
- phs318u 6mo ago
  But what do you do with all the waste energy? All those MW and GW have to end up somewhere and radiation into a vacuum is the hardest way to dump heat.
  - trhway 6mo ago
    At 70-80C (working temp of silicon chips) 1m2 radiates 700-800W, i.e. the heat of 1 GPU like H200 without any need for any cooling equipment beside the radiator itself( and may be some dumb heatpiping) . To acquire that energy you'd need 3-4m2 of solar panels. So a datacenter would be a large field of solar panels with a smaller field of heat radiators in their shadow. To the commenter below: yes, exactly, this is where my thinking on that started at the cryptocurrency boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 - as you don't need close connection between mining GPUs. For AI you'd need to cluster several together while still overall scheme is the same. >what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun. it is 120C at the Earth orbit. So you do need to have some reflection, either back through the solar panels, or the radiators to have a reflective back toward the solar panels in the shadow of which they are to be located.
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      You can probably (I haven't verified this) omit separate radiators and just use the back of the solar panels. Effectively you're describing mounting each H200 to the back of a 4 m^2 solar array at which point I suspect the equilibrium temperature will fall within an acceptable range. In fact the H200 and electricity are both entirely irrelevant here - the core question is what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun.
      - kreelman 6mo ago
        Would it be feasible to put several JWST-like stirling engines somewhere in the mix to use up some of that heat and turn it into some kind of useful energy? .... Perhaps running pumps that move around coolant passing over the cubes of GPUs? .. That would be extra weight/cost into orbit though... Also, don't solar panels have reduced efficiency when they're hot? And having anything hot surely increases failure rates.. with metals getting closer to melting points...?

by dgellow 6mo ago

The discourse on this topic is at the point where I have no idea if people are serious or satirical. Please tell me you don’t seriously believe data centers in spaces is a realistic idea

trhway 6mo ago

I don't "believe". I'm arithmetically sure that it is going to happen, and it will beat the ground based on pretty much all metrics. Some of my comments with napkin numbers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486 Just a very rough primitive illustration - a land for a house in SV is like a $1M, and putting a 10 ton house into space at $100/kg - $1M. Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis. And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism. Defense is one of the most important sovereign aspects, and upon acquiring it the transnationals will be able to acquire pretty fast the other sovereign aspects. Like enforcement of the Criminal Code of the Mars Colony - again pretty rough primitive illustration of course. The feudal Europe emerged on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and in our world the new order will be emerging faster on the outskirts (i.e. where reach and strength of the existing order is weaker), the space being one such "outskirts" dimension and the AI/hypercompute virtual world being the other. To the commenter below with reddit link : they use human env temp for heat radiation estimate. That lowers the numbers and requires AC equipment. Ie they estimate space station, not datacenter

phs318u 6mo ago
But what do you do with all the waste energy? All those MW and GW have to end up somewhere and radiation into a vacuum is the hardest way to dump heat.
- trhway 6mo ago
  At 70-80C (working temp of silicon chips) 1m2 radiates 700-800W, i.e. the heat of 1 GPU like H200 without any need for any cooling equipment beside the radiator itself( and may be some dumb heatpiping) . To acquire that energy you'd need 3-4m2 of solar panels. So a datacenter would be a large field of solar panels with a smaller field of heat radiators in their shadow. To the commenter below: yes, exactly, this is where my thinking on that started at the cryptocurrency boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 - as you don't need close connection between mining GPUs. For AI you'd need to cluster several together while still overall scheme is the same. >what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun. it is 120C at the Earth orbit. So you do need to have some reflection, either back through the solar panels, or the radiators to have a reflective back toward the solar panels in the shadow of which they are to be located.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    You can probably (I haven't verified this) omit separate radiators and just use the back of the solar panels. Effectively you're describing mounting each H200 to the back of a 4 m^2 solar array at which point I suspect the equilibrium temperature will fall within an acceptable range. In fact the H200 and electricity are both entirely irrelevant here - the core question is what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun.
    - kreelman 6mo ago
      Would it be feasible to put several JWST-like stirling engines somewhere in the mix to use up some of that heat and turn it into some kind of useful energy? .... Perhaps running pumps that move around coolant passing over the cubes of GPUs? .. That would be extra weight/cost into orbit though... Also, don't solar panels have reduced efficiency when they're hot? And having anything hot surely increases failure rates.. with metals getting closer to melting points...?