How does that change the calculus for space datacenters? There is still no reasons or benefits to having them in space. You still have to rely solely on radiative cooling. That doesn’t solve any of the maintenance problems.
Space datacenters is a really dumb and unrealistic idea Musk is talking about to hype his companies, it’s not meant to actually be done. Anything in space is more expensive and way harder to do, for a datacenter there is no benefit. We aren’t lacking places where to have them on earth
Plans for space data centers should be seen with skepticism. However when they are backed by different parties who have stakes in the game, that's more credible. More than HN crowd for sure.
OK, here's my problems with space data centers. How many of them has China solved?
1. Space is terrible for heat regulation. It's a perfect insulator for everything except radiative cooling, which is the least efficient. Hot things stay hot.
2. Space is full of radiation. Everything has to be radiation hardened, which makes it heavier, more expensive, and, yes, more difficult to cool.
3. Space is far away. Well, farther than a data center on Earth can be. I know China hasn't solved the speed of light.
We put up with it with satellites because it still has some advantages over trying to run cables literally everywhere, but we do, in fact, still use cables laid on the bottoms of the oceans.
So, is physics wrong, or is a country known for making dumb decisions some times making a dumb decision?
I would comfortably bet at least $1000 that this is bs, and it would be more money than China has put in so far. They've got a "vow."
To answer your first question, yes. Even if they were US companies. Remember when each Big Tech player was claiming to build their own blockchain, except centralized which was a contradiction.
I honestly think musk wants them there because they are hard to reach.
I do really think that if large numbers of jobs are indeed going to be displaced by AI, movements will pop up of people attacking datacenters (and honestly I wouldn't blame them even though it won't really accomplish anything). Having them in space keeps them out of reach of anyone but state actors.
To be precise, heat rejection via radiative cooling scales with the fourth power of the temperature (in K) the radiator operates at, all else constant.
By definition it is compute nodes in space. That is what a router is, a computer. Just a matter of scale. They could be improved to more compute and more storage per node. The framework is already there: treat these as disposable vs having to think about supporting them through maintenance.
If you look at how small a Starlink sat is, and how much of that space is taken up by power generation and storage, antennas, signal conditioning, RF electronics and more, I'm sure that whatever resources are running the computing in the entire starlink fleet orbiting the world can fit all together in one single row of servers in an existing datacenter.
And yes, a space-based computing node would not need quite as much of some of these things but they'll still need them in some way. It's not like you can just plug in a power and ethernet cable into them.
I doubt this will scale to a level that is actually useful. It's a nice experiment, just like Microsoft when they threw a datacenter container into the ocean. But not practical in the current conditions: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
Yes they say it is amazing and sustainable there in that blog post, yet somehow they've never bothered to do it again.
They can't make them a little bit bigger? But also I found this interesting image on the scale at hand here of a given launch of starlinks, no clue how many are included in a single launch, and it is a substantial amount of rack space they have been sending up at once:
So to me they have solved the issue of having a space based compute array network interfacing with the earth. They have solved the issue of launching and deploying this array. And their given launches seem to have a substantial payload of compute going up at once just in sheer volume. And right now the only real difference is that the nodes they are launching are just pretty weakly specced. Everything else is in place and turnkey.
But most of that is nothing to do with compute. A rack of servers is all compute. Starlink sats are antennas, RF amplifiers, solar panels, laser links, shielding, even maneuvering thrusters and fuel for those (they could be electrical ion thrusters but they'll still need reaction mass, not sure what type they use). Probably some inertial reaction wheels too, they are used for spacecraft orientation, not positioning.
They are sending a few racks of stuff up every launch but the problem is not that it's underspecced. It's that most of it is just needed for equipment survival and communication in space.
You're talking about an environment that's full of radiation and goes from -200C to +200C every 90 minutes. That needs to be orbit managed and cooled (and sometimes also heated) without any airflow. Just sticking a few servers in a barrel isn't going to do the job.
A datacenter is about data. Your network of space router is in no way something a reasonable person would consider a datacenter... Even less an inference datacenter.
Why, because on board storage is too small and the compute nodes are underpowered? And that can't ever change? A reasonable person doesn't understand technology usually. That is increasingly an understanding left to the wizard class.
I mean people make clusters out of raspberry pis and minipcs.
There is nothing magical here, you definitely don’t need to be a wizard to understand the hardware necessary for AI inference. You can make nice little clusters with rpis, yes, there is nothing magical about that, it’s pretty much baremetal 101. But no, you cannot run any meaningful inference on that cluster.
Maybe look at what is inside a datacenters, the amount of power required is very large, and the hardware to run the inference + network isn’t small. Then try to see how much sending that to space cost
> Why, because on board storage is too small and the compute nodes are underpowered?
Yes
> And that can't ever change?
It can, but but not for free. As the comment earlier in the thread was referring to, more computing power needs more cooling, and cooling in space is hard.
> A reasonable person doesn't understand technology usually.
What? Do you mean a layperson? Why does that matter when discussing the feasibility of space-based AI datacenters?
> That is increasingly an understanding left to the wizard class.
No, you can get there with a bachelor's degree in a relevant subject. Or just reading informative news sources.
> I mean people make clusters out of raspberry pis and minipcs.
> Anything in space is more expensive and way harder to do, for a datacenter there is no benefit.
If we pick an extremely fast orbit, then relativity means the hardware will age out (slightly) slower, so I'm sure that'll help with the maintenance issue.
It's the wrong way around though. Ideally we want to speed up our current compute ability not slow it down; if it experiences more time than we do then it can do more. Relative-MHz means my slower hardware becomes tangibly fast again.
General Relativity says mass warps space time, so we need to get these datacentres out of the Earth's gravity well. And the Sun's, and the Milky Way's; out into the deepest void of intergalactic space. The good news is that a maintenance callout is still quicker than some of the earth based DC's I've had gear in, but the bad news is that it doesn't get us much of anything at all.
Special Relativity lets us abuse time with speed (something I discovered as a teenager). Going faster than Earth means we experience less time, so we just need to try and slow down comparative to our home base. The earth is orbiting the Sun at ~30km/s, the solar system is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way at ~230km/s and our local group of galaxies is moving relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background at ~600km/s. We can easily get our DataSpaceCentre up to 1,000km/s or more, so we just need to point it relative to all that movement we mentioned above making stationary relative to the universe. It's completely doable, but (as well as far more variable response times to callouts) only gets us an extra second of compute over a human lifetime.
Fundamentally, we're attacking this problem in the wrong direction. Earth's gravity is comparatively minor, and our piddly ~600km/s relative movement is a tiny fraction of the speed of light. We should be filling The Earth with compute, and then decamping humanity into space and travelling at relativistic speeds. Or put the compute in space and move the Earth into the event horizon of a black hole. You can't do the inverse of Interstellar keeping Earth where it is, the maths isn't in our favour. If everyone lived on (a less moist) Miller's Planet, we'd get 7 years of compute every hour. It puts Moore's Law to shame; the relative MHz are obscene.
There's the obvious problem of communications. I'm led to believe there's issues with radio and light, so this probably isn't a job for fibre. Veritasium seemed to imply a battery, switch, lightbulb and a wire stretching around the globe would light instantaneously, so I'm sure we can come up with a new copper Ethernet standard for low latency over solar distances.
