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Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers
- ge96 5mo agoI'm excited I think of the Cowboy Bebop episode (Jamming With Edward) where they hunt down a rogue satellite to get data off it. Also think it would be crazy to have a worm spread across the servers/starlink, would there be an antivirus system onboard or maybe not applicable, says RTOS can get a virus
- josefritzishere 5mo agoI appreciate the sci-fi quality of this but when the IPO comes remember the "fi" stands for "fiction."
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo ago> At ABI Research, where I work as an aerospace analyst, we did a rough total-cost-of-ownership comparison between a data center on Earth and one in space. It showed that the cost to launch and run a GPU in space for a year is at least an order of magnitude higher than the same feat in a terrestrial data center.
- btilly 5mo agoJust so that nobody jumps in with what I first wanted to jump in with, this estimate was done with the assumption that Elon Musk's Starship is built, works as advertised, and launch costs are at the lower end of the projected range. It wasn't an order of magnitude more because of how expensive rocket launches currently are. (I'm glad that I read the article before arguing this one...)
- mannykannot 5mo agoAnd in the next paragraph: "However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include ... active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit." A self-justifying purpose!
- tristanj 5mo agoEconomics calculator for Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoYou are altogether externalizing the cost of carbon dioxide emissions that humanity has to pay for. The resulting global warming is not a joke. The heat problem cumulatively is bigger on Earth than it would be in space.
- xnx 5mo agoCost = emmissions
- DoctorOetker 5mo agoNo, cost is not directly proportional to emissions. Heat emission in space is not problematic for humans
- xnx 5mo agoAre you counting the emissions to get the datacenters into space?
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoHonestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.
- hangonhn 5mo agoI know Microsoft tried it. They had a press release saying it was successful but never did it again. Does anyone know more about that? I agree with you that data centers in the ocean seem a better bet.
- rtkwe 5mo agoIt's like the idea of Mars as a backup to human civilization. The technology required to make Mars livable and independent from Earth is so advanced it would allow you to survive basically anything here on Earth already.
- rbanffy 5mo agoI would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used. It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoOne huge advantage of ocean data centers is that you can do geothermal down there more cheaply and easily, and it's a very consistent source of power, so you don't even need hydro. Additionally, deep ocean water is consistently very near freezing, you could get below freezing out of the water but then you lose conduction efficiency. The replacability is nice, but even in terrestrial data centers there are situations where something fails and it never gets replaced, just routed around, until the pod gets ripped out and replaced in its entirety.
- stackghost 5mo ago>I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used. Advocating for exacerbating the melting of the polar ice cap, which will endanger dozens of millions of people, just to have more convenient data centers for manufacturing AI slop, is peak HN.
- jobead 5mo agoWhy is everyone so focused on heat when cosmic rays randomly scrambling memory is going to be a much bigger problem?
- Pxtl 5mo agoCosmic rays can probably be resolved with some parity bits and redundancy. Especially since these don't have to be located way up in geosynch, lower orbits get you more magnetosphere protection. Not that it isn't a problem, but I think heat dissipation will have the edge.
- rbanffy 5mo agoYou can also place the most sensitive electronics inside a module within the propellant tank. That also should help a lot.
- convolvatron 5mo agoI worked at the architecture level on designs to mitigate signal corruption inside the asic. I don't remember the exact numbers, and obviously it depends on the design. but you need to add error detection and correction on every path (busses, mixes, registers, function units, etc). the number I seem to recall was a 25% area overhead and a nominal decrease in clock rate. this was for an earth-bound very large machine, so idk if that would be sufficient for space. usually those designs have much larger nodes and much slower clock rates. primarily because of damage caused by ionizing radiation that accumulates over time. so sure, the heat issue seems fatal, but rad-hard designs will certainly have a bottom line impact
- jrflo 5mo agoYou're gonna need a lot more than a parity bit.
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoI mean, LLMs are already a pile of stochastic output .. maybe that just adds to the fun? /s
- ForHackernews 5mo agoTyranny of the rocket equation[0] makes it hard for me to conceive how an orbital data centre could ever make sense. If you just want to escape permitting laws, why not float it in international waters? That's a much more accessible and hospitable environment than LEO. [0] https://archive.is/qp4gP https://archive.is/qp4gP
- ggreer 5mo agoSpace gets you 24/7 solar power. To run a data center for 12 hours without sunlight, you'd need massive batteries. Also oceans have weather and corrosion. The issue with putting stuff in space isn't the kinetic energy required. In LEO that's about 30 megajoules per kilogram or $5 worth of propellant. The issue is that orbital launch vehicles are not reusable, so you must destroy an expensive rocket to get your payload to orbit. All of these space datacenter efforts are betting that Starship will be fully reusable.
- piloto_ciego 5mo agoYou can't just sea-stead your way to it though, salt water + network accessibility + literal piracy + how much data you can move + the environmental toll of doing much of anything on the see = equally crazy challenges with more laws that can stop you. By the time you got permission to lay all the cables you'd need to lay, etc. your competition would already be done with their space data center, or Lunar one in a peak of eternal sunshine or whatever. This is a race to the most compute. Whoever gets the most geniuses in their "country of geniuses in a datacenter" wins. Wins what? Well, everything they want effectively forever.
- arjie 5mo agoOnly a single order of magnitude of cost? So a $4b data center on Earth delivers the same value as a $40b data center in Space? So if you have greater than a 95% operating margin and capacity constraints (either due to nation environmental law, power limits, or other such blockers) then this is a no-brainer - a 95% operating margin becomes a 50% operating margin. The return on capital is much much lower so you have to be anticipating cheaper capital, even cheaper costs than this in practice, or something else. Inference margins are some 70% right now? So it needs quite some work on both sides but this seems to make it seem more achievable than I previously thought.
- giraffe_lady 5mo agoIt assumes $44/kg to launch into orbit. Idk where that came from if it's a musk claim or what but it's ludicrous against current costs. Currently still at thousands/kg and dropping but nowhere near $44 and I haven't heard anyone claim that's likely who isn't selling a rocket company.
- mikestorrent 5mo agoThat seems pretty cheap, like, can I launch my cat's ashes into space or something for $50?
- bluecalm 5mo agoThe plan is to launch from Earth in the beginning stages and then switch to launching from the Moon which has no atmosphere so you don't need rockets and can use an electromagnetic gun instead. That requires satellite manufacturing on the Moon and I guess the minerals required will come from asteroid mining. That's my understanding of what Elon said about how it's going to work.
- davidkwast 5mo agoSo the majority of the hardware should stay on the moon where latency isn't so critical. There the cooling won't be the problem.
- khuey 5mo agoI'm not usually an "AI is going to kill us all" kind of person but on the off chance we do get Skynet/etc why would we give the machines the literal high ground?
- short_sells_poo 5mo agoBecause that's the next generation's problem, and we can do more to mortgage their future for our own luxury :)
- Terr_ 5mo agoI think it's less Skynet and more Wintermute: Some people saw the movie Elysium or read a summary of the book Neuromancer, and decided those were aspirational visions of how to be Untouchably Rich In Space. Though there is a simpler explanation: Some guy with lots of stock in Rocket Launches and Datacenters has an extreme financial incentive to push stories where spending on both things simultaneously is the big new thing.
- jayGlow 5mo agothere has been a lot of pushback about building new data centers basically anywhere on earth might as well build them in space.
- Zigurd 5mo agoRemember space manufacturing? When the first modules of ISS were launched 27 years ago, that was supposed to be the next big thing. Space manufacturing, asteroid mining, and space data centers are pipedreams. The capital equipment is too heavy, and 100% forever automated operations are not realistic.
- 6510 5mo agoIt's still full of delicious rocks with completely insane market value. They sit there waiting for our greed and capabilities to reach escape velocity. Some day there will be a TEMU space station drop shipping custom fidget spinners to wherever we desire them. Probably not any time soon but eventually...
- Ekaros 5mo agoSpace manufacturing has always been fun one. It is like people have no understanding just how complex the supply chains for well anything we make these days are. Just look at COVID and hit on JIT. Mining is also hard and harsh. One of the more hostile environments to operate for machinery. Lot of mechanical wear. And having that in space makes any maintenance extremely harder... Maybe once we can do all that fully autonomously and by that I mean with near zero non-remote intervention we might start thinking about space...
- inopinatus 5mo ago“Solved problem”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain It merely remains to build one.
- mikestorrent 5mo agoSilly human, won't be us building that. Just hope that you get one of the nice gilded cages!
- OutOfHere 5mo agoThe best thing for space GPUs would to run at a much high temperature, thereby allowing the radiator to be fairly small. This would require a special high-temperature GPU, with robust radiation protection and error correction, ideally in solar orbit. I have a video https://youtu.be/s7Mv_OcBXI8 https://youtu.be/s7Mv_OcBXI8 covering the approach for heat rejection.
- poppafuze 5mo agoGravity. That's what rules orbital-anything.
- macspoofing 5mo ago>Why Orbital Data Centers Are Harder Than Silicon Valley Thinks Who thinks they are easy? Elon Musk? The guy that spews obvious (even to him) bullshit like we're going to Mars in the next 5 years? I don't even want to read the article. It is obvious that Orbital Data Centers have MASSIVE engineering challenges. They may never be cost-effective.
- melodyogonna 5mo agoAll very interesting, but I'd wait and see what people with real-world experience running Spacecraft can come up with before dismissing the entire endeavor.
- ericd 5mo agoAnyone know why everyone focuses on the radiators, when the solar panels are significantly larger?
- jmyeet 5mo agoLet's be honest. The only reason orbital data centers are a talking point at all is to justify the stratospheric SpaceX valuation for the IPO. There's literally no other reason. Everybody who knows anything about data centers understands this. You don't even need to get into the thermodynamics of cooling where the only option is radiating away heat. Terrestial data centers have to use water cooling because the heat generation is so significant. The real problem is failure. When you have a lot of servers, things fail all the time. Hard drives, SSDs, RAM chips, GPUs, motherboard, etc. Servers are designed to be able to quickly replace parts. If your data center is in orbit, these parts will just fail and there is no repair. There's certainly no economic repair. If I remember my numbers rightly, at a company like Amazon or Google, the ratio is (IIRC) 1 FTE per 10,000 servers, meaning if you have 10,000 servers, 1 FTE will spend their entire time just replacing parts. A good hardware tech will have a pool of known good parts. When a server detects a fault, they'll go and replace probably everything with known good parts and then figure out what's wrong later. In GPU heavy DCs I suspect 1 FTE can cover fewer than that just because the heat management is much more complicated. I really can't believe we're still talking about this. It borders on journalistic malpractice to even suggest this is a realistic possibility.
- piloto_ciego 5mo agoI mean, I think it's cool and a "good idea" in terms of getting off this rock and out into the black. We can do it, we just have to decide we want to. If we're going to have a Tulip Mania Redux I'd rather have it with space data centers and reusable rockets and autonomous human-level AI moonshots/boondoggles than... I don't know, literal tulips, or factoring large numbers to mine bitcoin or whatever...
- tzs 5mo agoThere's also the issue of scaling. Say you can make the engineering work for building a data center in space. Nobody wants to build just one, or even just a handful. Musk has talked about 10000 launches a year for deploying and maintaining data centers. At that scale pollution becomes a serious issue. It hasn't been a problem so far because we haven't launched a lot of rockets. Cumulatively the world has under about 8000 orbital launches and under 40000 launches that were not orbital but reached the stratosphere. Orbital rocket emissions have an impact far beyond what you might expect just from looking at the mass of what they emit, because they emit much of it the upper atmosphere. Many things that when emitted near the surface are only a local problem become a global problem if you emit them in the upper atmosphere.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoSpace datacenters make no sense. Build them in the oceans? Then you can actually fix them as well.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoHow would you power them in the ocean? One of the attractions of space is the free power (the other apparently being less regulations, which may also not apply to the ocean). I don't know if Musk, or anyone else, has talked about the economics of not being able to (economically) fix things in space. Presumably the idea would be to avoid components that fail more rapidly like mechanical hard drives (use SSDs instead), and to have redundancy so that even if one component fails it doesn't mean the whole satellite/node is now useless. He must have done the math that at the anticipated failure rate each satellite would pay for itself before failing and needing to be replaced.
- octaane 5mo agoScience fiction beat the author of this article to the punch re: novel cooling solutions in space. The author proposes squirting oil from one arm, through open vacuum, to another arm - the oil droplets radiate the heat en route from arm 1 to arm 2. However, like most modern tech, science fiction writing has anticipated it. In the book Saturns Run (2015), by John Stanford and Ctien, their spaceship cools down it's megawatt nuclear reactor by using a eutectic metal as coolant, which runs as a molten ribbon through open vacuum from arm 1 to arm 2.
- Ekaros 5mo agoLooking at current memory market. Are we already at point where after decommissioning recycling the memory chips could make economic sense? Maybe with anything else like say if significant amount of copper is used for power or cooling. With space either you expand even more resources to get stuff back in one piece or it burns... Down on surface you can just ship them to facilities to do this. Maybe even automate lot of parts as these should be standard configurations.
- espinielli 5mo agowouldn't it be nice to blow with some gas a (conductive) balloon around the heat exchanger? You would increase the external area and heat exchange would be with a gas... Just out of my mind...maybe silly.