Starcloud

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/

by jonbaer • 9 months ago

186 226 9 months ago

blogs.nvidia.com

wiz21c2• 9 months ago

I though that refrigerating things in space was using a lot of energy because heat cannot dissipate in the void of space.

Moreover, why are the energy cost 10x lower when in space you have unlimited access to sun power? Is it the cost of building the energy production infrastructure ?

wiz21c2• 9 months ago

and what about solar storms...

spicybright• 9 months ago

The whole thing is bogus, you could plop the hardware in the middle of a desert and have everything perform way better for cheaper.

I'm surprised nvidia put their name on this.

ben_w2• 9 months ago

Lots of things limit the benefit of putting PV in space. UV damages the semiconductors faster, ditto micrometeoroids, it's just plain expensive to put stuff up there in the first place…

It's not a slam-dunk "no", we are seeing developments on all metrics. It's just that right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the claim of x10 improvement was anywhere from correct to x100 over-optimistic.

Reubend• 9 months ago

Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost savings from the "free" solar power.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188

petesergeant• 9 months ago

Their website pitches it as 16 square km

GCUMstlyHarmls2• 9 months ago

Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field.

Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.

perihelions2• 9 months ago

There's already about 0.4 square km of solar panels across the Starlink constellation. (~4,000 v2 satellites at ~100 meter^2 each).

dlisboa• 9 months ago

Wouldn't a 16km² gigantic solar roof on Earth already cover the energy needs that they're pitching will be saved with this space data center?

gtsnexp3• 9 months ago

Their white paper touches on the issue, which seems slightly hand-wavy without much detail on quantification. They could potentially take advantage of heat gradients from deep space and dissipate heat to explore the Seeback effect.

philipwhiuk4• 9 months ago

Deep space? So they want to be outside geostationary orbit?

api• 9 months ago

This is a big thing never shown in sci-fi. For example, those huge torch ships in The Expanse would need gigantic radiators. Even if the drive were upwards of 90% efficient the waste heat would melt the engine and the rest of the ship.

Even the ISS has sizable radiators. The Shuttle had deployable radiators in the form of the bay doors if my memory serves me correctly.

Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.

There’s no air resistance in space so radiators don’t impact your flight characteristics.

rolisz• 9 months ago

The Mass Effect video games talk about cooling ships, with the warships glowing red from heat if they go too fast

throwanem• 9 months ago

Your memory serves well with respect to the Shuttle. Astronaut Mike Mullane, from his autobiography Riding Rockets:

Next [after loading the computers with on-orbit software] we opened the payload bay doors. The inside of those doors contained radiators used to dump the heat generated by our electronics into space. If they failed to open, we’d have only a couple hours to get Discovery back on Earth before she fried her brains. But both doors swung open as planned, another milestone passed.

philipwhiuk4• 9 months ago

Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.

I imagine it's the same reason James Cameron is a world expert on submersibles - the guy picks individual topics in his movies to really get right.

setgree• 9 months ago

Neal Stephenson's _Seveneves_ covers these dynamics in detail :)

zingerlio• 9 months ago

The book Saturn Run has an interesting design utilized for a spaceship.

dariusj18• 9 months ago

Given the water needs of data centers and the ongoing and upcoming water scarcity, I imagine the problem of heat dissipation seems easier to solve, long term, in space.

LiamPowell• 9 months ago

We can and do build data centres that don't use evaporative cooling, evaporation is just often the cheapest option in places with large natural water sources.

hiddencost3• 9 months ago

Wut?

axegon_• 9 months ago

My initial thought was "cooling is going to be a fun challenge, in addition to data transfer, latency, hardware maintenance and all that other fun stuff". It truly feels like one of those, you-have-too-much-money moments.

notahacker7• 9 months ago

You've also got the problem of cosmic radiation flipping bits. Your fault tolerant architecture probably mitigates this with redundancy, with the extra servers again eating into the purported advantages of extra solar power. Dealing with the PITA of single event upsets is something developers of edge data processing software in space put up with to avoid the latency issues that data clouds in space introduce

preisschild2• 9 months ago

I wonder if "normal" RDIMM ECC would be enough to mitigate most of those radiation bit-flipping issues. If so it wouldn't really make a difference to earth-based servers since most enterprise servers use RDIMM ECC too

btown• 9 months ago

In all seriousness, if AI models can handle quantization, they can handle some flipped bits from time to time! There are probably some fascinating papers to be written around how to choose which layers in an LLM architecture could benefit more than others from redundant computation in a high-radiation environment.

drcongo2• 9 months ago

I learned something interesting here, thanks. I've never really thought about it so I'd always assumed space = cold so that would be fine.

teekert• 9 months ago

Space is cold. There are just very little cold molecules to take over the energy from your hot molecules.

Here on earth we are surrounded by many molecules, that are not so cold, but colder than us and together they can take a lot of our excess heat energy away.

Gravityloss3• 9 months ago

By my back of the envelope calculations, the radiators would be comparable to the solar arrays, probably somewhat smaller and not massively bigger at least.

amelius2• 9 months ago

Care to share them?

stuff4ben• 9 months ago

If the Mass Effect games have taught me anything, it's that heat dissipation in outer space is hard.

gs173• 9 months ago

They taught me that Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Which is probably something else these space data centers will struggle against, it'll be interesting to see how much shielding they have against impacts. There was a Soyuz that had a coolant leak blamed on a micrometeorite strike.

deepanwadhwa2• 9 months ago

Not sure if I follow really. Cooling from it's own generated heat? Are we even sure the system would get that hot in the first place? The temperatures can plunge up to -200 degrees. If needed, they'd cool it just like they keep the James Webb Telescope cool.

BadBadJellyBean• 9 months ago

Keeping things cool in space is very hard. On earth we usually transfer heat from one medium to another (water to water, water to air, etc.). In space that's not possible because even though the matter in space is quite cold, there is very little. Therefore the only real way to get rid of heat in space is to radiate it away (think infrared light bulb). The James Webb Telescope does the same thing.

space_ghost• 9 months ago

The Webb telescope is a _wildly_ different apparatus, designed from the ground up to run as cool as possible, and with an effectively unlimited budget. It lives in the shadow of the Earth behind multiple layers of shielding. These "data centers" need to live in direct sunlight and operate as cheaply as possible _at scale._ Very little of Webb's tech is applicable.

hiddencost3• 9 months ago

There are two real challenges in running a data center: how to get power in (reliably), and how to get heat out.

Any data center that isn't generating massive heat is a waste of our time.

And no, JWST is not doing industrial scale cooling.

deepanwadhwa2• 9 months ago

Thank you for the responses. I understand the issue a bit more now.

burnte2• 9 months ago

Even beyond cooling, just getting all the hardware up there is extremely costly, and for what benefit over ground based DCs? The cooling is the ongoing problem but the cost of lifting it there obliterates all the other problems, IMO.

mickeyfrac• 9 months ago

Space X thinks they will reduce the cost by 90% with Starship, so they are probably calculating off that.

ncr100• 9 months ago

And who is The Law, in space? What's to prevent E.G. Amazon Kuiper or Musk Starlink from crashing one of their vehicles into the array, when they want to takeover their market?

dabluecaboose2• 9 months ago

Maybe this is reductive, but there are times that I'm concerned the only thing keeping me from getting gobs and gobs of startup funds are the facts that I understand basic principles of engineering in space.

I could be wrong and this will be a slam dunk. To me, however, the costs/complexity (Cooling, SRP perturbation, stationkeeping, rendezvous, etc.) far outweigh the benefits of the Cheap as Free (tm) solar power

i_am_jl2• 9 months ago

Assuming these people don't understand that their ideas are unworkable is a mistake. Don't believe for a second they are stupid or ignorant.

The difference between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen isn't that the citizen knows that crimes are wrong, it's that the citizen cares that crimes are wrong and the criminal doesn't.

NoPicklez3• 9 months ago

Reading the paper they wrote on this from their GitHub site, it does take into account the thermal management aspects quite considerably.

https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

Your thinking seems more risk averse, which is similar to myself. However that doesn't mean that without the business drivers these types of things can't happen if enough attention is given too it. Costs are often because we're comparing one thing which has significant efficiencies built into the supply chain, vs something that doesn't, which by virtue drives up the cost. Perhaps Nvidia have money to burn on trying something.

guluarte• 9 months ago

interesting, what if we put datacenters in the ocean floor with nuclear power? like the Army Janus program

foobarian• 9 months ago

Hey, at least it's not going to end up with a bunch of actual people getting treatment based on invalid blood test results.

EricMausler• 9 months ago

Alternatively, assuming they are aware of the cost, what does this say about what they are implying the cost of electricity is going to be?

dheera• 9 months ago

TFA> “In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy,”

Why is this exclusive to space? If you're powering datacenters on solar, one would think covering the Sahara or other large desert in datacenters would be easier than launching them into space. Renewable energy is just as plentiful and free there, you can connect it to the rest of the world with multiple TB/s of fiber links, and the construction/maintainence costs would be a few orders of magnitude less.

omnimus• 9 months ago

But then you wouldn't be able to launch to space. It would also seem like a very mundane project wouldn't it?

NoPicklez3• 9 months ago

The Github paper seems to indicate they have considered the thermal aspects fairly heavily and mention that "conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space".

yencabulator2• 9 months ago

Figure 3 shows they're hoping to have a 4km x 4km combo solar panel and radiator. The main truss of ISS is 110 meters long.

These plans are so much larger than anything built so far that they're scifi.

kilroy123• 9 months ago

They really don't want to let this bubble pop, do they?

jiggawatts2• 9 months ago

This is a con artist smelling “idiots with too much money and nowhere else to spend it.”

They’re the same sort as the cold fusion people coming out of the woodwork with “investment opportunities” during the peak of ZIRP.

JanneVee• 9 months ago

Uhm, isn't radiation a problem outside of the atmosphere? How fast are the data transfers going to be? so many questions...

qwertytyyuu• 9 months ago

Thats a ridiculous amount of solar pannels to send up. I don't really think this is going to work/be viable

J07• 9 months ago

Engineer call out for diskswap

sgt• 9 months ago

Where we're going... we won't need disks! Memstores all the way

gtsnexp3• 9 months ago

The prelude of a Dyson Sphere!

einrealist2• 9 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

anonzzzies• 9 months ago

Would this not only work if there are solar arrays always catching the sun while the gpus are never in the sun?

temperceve• 9 months ago

It really feels like I'm living in the future, lately.

jiggawatts2• 9 months ago

This is absolute nonsense.

The first thing to consider is that this thing won’t be stationary!

Geosynchronous orbit is much more expensive to reach per kg launched, even for Starship… when it starts working properly.

Lower orbits… aren’t stationary. Who wants a data centre that’s “over the horizon” from the owning country most of the time!?

If you think AWS egress costs are bad? Just add some zeroes! No, more zeroes than that…

non-2• 9 months ago

Nothing stopping the satellite data center from communicating back to homebase via Starlink network right?

Would probably need to negotiate for a huge amount of dedicated priority bandwidth, but latency shouldn't actually be that bad.

ben_w2• 9 months ago

Round-trip to GEO will add 238.7 milliseconds to whatever other infra you have over the last 200 km vertically* and whatever along the ground. It's probably fine for some things, but not for everything.

* while there could, in principle, be no extra infra in the last 200 km vertically, that means someone on the ground is talking directly to GEO. As per similar discussion about big PV space stations beaming power to the ground, your minimum ground spot size for a transmitter this big and this far away is still tens of km, which limits the other parts of your overall system design.

actionfromafar• 9 months ago

It will soon come back from over the other horizon. :)

Of all the things insane about this proposal, I'm not very bothered about this one. It could be high availability and distributed by default. Like having redundant datacenters with eventual consistency on all continents. Except the continents are spinning really fast above you...

The animation is wild... 5GW concentrated up there at the top of a field of solar panels - it's not a Starcloud, it's an electric Starfurnace.

esafak• 9 months ago

Why can't it be geostationary? Laser communication can get you gigabit speeds today. That would take a month to transmit GPT-5's estimated 280TB training corpus, which is acceptable. Latency does not matter.

Gazoche3• 9 months ago

With geostationary orbit you won't ever get less than 200ms round-trip latency from the ground (at the speed of light).

Fine for some applications, but a massive regression from modern fiber infrastructure and definitely not suitable for everything (just think how slow the modern web is even with 15ms connections to datacenters). There's a reason why Starlink & co are trying to set up communication satellites closer to the ground.

boesboes• 9 months ago

What a scam

blourvim• 9 months ago

So many questions, like how would you protect from bit flips, damage to circuits. "10x lower energy costs and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth." I am not sure if we need a rocket scientist to calculate the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator and just letting it run. What happens when the servers need to retire due to some unpatchable bug

torginus5• 9 months ago

Yeah, radiation is the enemy of integrated circuits, cosmic radiation is more damaging the smaller the features get.

You pretty much have to have multiple redundancy and special space-rated HW, which I wouldn't be surprised is stuck at super old process nodes to mitigate this exact same issue.

notahacker7• 9 months ago

Tbf, leaving aside the claims about datacentres in space, working with Nvidia on radiation hardening its latest generation chips would be a good project...

perihelions2• 9 months ago

"the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator"

I believe it's on the order of magnitude of 100x return (for a low-orbit space photovoltiac panel that's (almost) always facing direct sun).

    (/ (* ([W (kg -1)] 200)   ;; reasonable space PV power/mass ratio
          ([year] 10)         ;; guess at lifespan
          ([ton] 100))        ;; Starship payload
       (* ([ton] 1000)        ;; tons of liquid methane in Starsihp
          ([J (kg -1)] 5e7))) ;; specific energy density of CH₄
    
    ;; => 126.226944

exitb• 9 months ago

So many questions to be asked, I don't know where to start. What's the upside of bunching up all the servers into a single megastructure rather than separate satellites?

scottydelta• 9 months ago

It’s more of a building the solution first and then look for the problem because why the heck not.

stevage2• 9 months ago

Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length.

That is...very, very large.

BoppreH• 9 months ago

For scale, that's twice as large (energy-wise) as AWS's us-east-1, which itself is a group of ~170 data centers.

bearjaws• 9 months ago

We've officially lost the plot, we will now ship our AI data centers to ~space~ ... This will not work with modern technology.

The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day, requiring you to either shift all workloads or add substantial UPS weight. The radiator grid you need to cool 125kw is something like 16x the size of the entire data center.

I watched this video last week that went into 3 different scenarios, it's a good watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o

martindbp• 9 months ago

So what you're saying is we should put them on the moon?

mr_toad• 9 months ago

The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day

Depends on the orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_angle

cubefox• 9 months ago

Yeah, I just wanted to link to the same video.

By the way, the same channel also has a sobering video on commercial space stations. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2G60Y3ydtqY

non-2• 9 months ago

One of the selling points they mention is that they won't need to use any fresh water for cooling.

My understanding was that water-demands on Earth were an overblown issue and minuscule when compared to other uses of fresh water such as watering one acre of farmland.

Not to mention, "used" water is just "warm" water that can then be used again for other purposes.

So are they perpetuating a myth here? Or is water use a bigger issue than I thought?

welferkj• 9 months ago

It's not a real issue, but it's truthy enough to generate real opposition to datacenter buildout and catalyze AI hate. So definitionally avoiding it from the get-go might end up being worth it.

sanex2• 9 months ago

It really depends where they get the water. If they're pumping an aquifer fry and doing evaporative cooling they could be just boiling an entire areas water source. If they could figure out how to use salt water it'd be ideal.

thinkingtoilet• 9 months ago

Well, for one thing you can't eat GPUs, so I'm ok with farmland taking up more water.

Also, the "warm" water has already destroyed ecosystems because the data centers are just dumping it. It's a completely solvable issue if we had any common sense regulations.

heeton2• 9 months ago

Minor correction: the water is evaporated. It remains in the water cycle but is removed from the water source for any downstream users.

xnx3• 9 months ago

Shameful to see this on Nvidia's site. They have real engineers and business prowess. This is really shaking my assumptions about the company.

rpmisms2• 9 months ago

Why is this shameful?

hiddencost3• 9 months ago

Because it's crank science harvesting money from people who don't understand physics.

Heat is almost impossible to dissipate in space because there's negligible matter to take the heat away.

blondie9x• 9 months ago

“The only energy is the launch”, that’s false.

Energy went into mining, extracting, refining, transporting all the raw materials needed to make these chips.

This is typical tech industry green washing as the industry fails to accept its destructive influence on the planet.

We need practical solutions that help reduce consumption and waste and actually address the issues. We don’t always need more we need to find a way to use less.

bpicolo2• 9 months ago

In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space,” Johnston predicts.

Can I bet on the contrary odds? Could throw down my whole retirement with confidence

danielbln• 9 months ago

Yeah, who throws out these sort of timeframe in earnest? We haven't built anything in space since the ISS (which is in LEO mind you, not "outer space"), and we're building full data centers within a decade? Give me a break, that's an Elon level prediction.

Oras• 9 months ago

I read it as something an ambitious founder would say, not to be taken literally.

Think: "AI will replace all software developers in 6 months"

righthand3• 9 months ago

This used to be called fraud, now it’s cutesy lying?

Mistletoe• 9 months ago

https://longbets.org/

Havoc• 9 months ago

Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink.

The famously heat conductive vacuum...

Someone fedex a vacuum flask full of hot coffee to nvidia HQ with an explanatory note.

nine_k6• 9 months ago

More seriously, space is pretty cold, and will consume large amounts of radiated heat. The problem, of course, it that the amount you can radiate thermally at, say, 150°C is pretty limited. According to the Stephan-Bolzmann equation, it's about 1800W for a perfect black body. For 5GW, that would take a square radiator 1.7km wide, always concealed from sunlight. Realistically, much larger as the temperature would drop as the coolant flows along.

ppaattrriicckk• 9 months ago

Apart from getting 16 sq. km of solar arrays and radiators into orbit - and without jumping to conclusions about whether this is a borderline scam - I can imagine 2 obvious showstoppers:

1) Space debris. This is proposal is several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest things in near-Earth orbits. Thus equally many orders more likely to be hit by, and create, space debris

2) Heat transport - this isn't my home turf, but I can't imagine building something lightweight enough to be launched, yet also capable of transferring enough heat away from the 5 GW core, without it melting/breaking

It's been a while since I read their whitepaper, but I don't recall either of those points being addressed.

mercutio2• 9 months ago

LEO is the last place you should worry about space debris.

Space is just unfathomably large. If you aren’t in the same orbital plane, you’re just not going to have a problem. And if you did, Kessler syndrome in LEO is a non problem.

Could be an issue for specific orbital planes in stable orbits, but even there, it’s overblown.

einrealist2• 9 months ago

It's going to be fun constantly repairing all those solar arrays. We'll be destroying our planet with the rocket launches alone. But hey! The more ridiculous the idea, the greater the chance that Trump and his conspiracy-laden circle will embrace it. It works in science fiction movies and novels, why not in reality, duh. /s

torginus5• 9 months ago

I have had people point out that building a Dyson sphere is pretty much a dumb idea, and there's no concievable reason why we would build one even if we could.

Now we have one - venture capital.

senectus1• 9 months ago

pipe dream. this isnt going to happen before the AI bubble pops. Then when it does there wont be a drive for it.

Ekaros2• 9 months ago

Actual engineering question. How large can you scale a cooling system in space? And I mean say from radial central point. Surely at some point it just doesn't work anymore. Or you spend more energy to get energy to point where you can radiate it away than you can radiate.

beAbU• 9 months ago

I believe there is math for this very question. A similar principle applies with heatsinks. You cant just continue increasing the heatsink on a CPU, the outer edge of a large heatsink won't go above ambient and thus any heatsink bigger than that is wasting material.

I would guess in a system where coolant is pumped and the added heat of that you'll have a similar problem. This is probably further exacerbated by the fact that you cant do clever things to increase surface area - your radiating surfaces must all "see" the black of space in order to function.

0xcb0• 9 months ago

They state that in 10 years all data centers will be in outer space. I state that in 10 years we will look back and think this was a ridiculous idea. The meta and maintenance costs, the pollution of sending them to space, the space pollution itself, the outer space radiation, the extra redundant error correction needed*,* and much more all speak against this. Why not throw that trillion dollars into optical computing chip research? Why not create better sustainable methods here on earth*?* We could run a single data center down here, or pay a million times moreto do this in space. The argument that we are polluting Earth down here is very weak. Yes, we do, but why on earth do we then not invest more in research for solving these problems*?* There are startups out there that will one day solve these issues. And then space data centers will be something for the Star Trek age, which humanity will probably never achieve.

nine_k6• 9 months ago

I think the bigger thing about a space-based data center that it's not on anyone's land, and not easy to inspect or capture.

Solar energy available around the clock allows it to be self-sufficient for a long time.

I suppose there will be some demand for high-security, high-price setups like that.

notahacker7• 9 months ago

But read/write access to the datacentre is on someone's land, and spacefaring powers without access to that can still interfere with its effective operation...

LunaSea2• 9 months ago

Either the satellite is geostationary and doesn't have 24h / 24h sun exposure as energy source.

Or they are not geostationary but it also means the datacenter will connect to a different earth base station which means the data access route would change and latency would increase which would be unacceptable for a lot of use cases.

You would then need to replicate and synchronise customer data across the different space data centres to make it possible to access said data in constant and low-latency time.

skywhopper2• 9 months ago

Once it’s easy enough to launch the hundreds of launches it would take to build one of these, it will also be trivial to launch a drone that can physically attach and attack them. This is the opposite of a secure facility.

phillipcarter• 9 months ago

that it's not on anyone's land

Oh you can bet that, if we assume this happens in 10 years, various countries will absolutely do a "land grab" up high. There is no escaping it.

NaomiLehman• 9 months ago

Right. also wouldn't space debris eventually hitting the huge solar panel system be an issue?

kiernanmcgowan• 9 months ago

Whats going to be delivered first - Tesla FSD or a space based data center?

westurner• 9 months ago

Would it be more cost effective and more sustainable to heavily invest in graphene semiconductors than space-based datacenters? Is that a false dilemma?

Aren't there advantages to fabricating GO Graphene Oxide and CNT Carbon Nanotubes in microgravity?

robertclaus2• 9 months ago

You'll never be able to do maintenance or upgrade these things. The up front cost seems extremely high given the risk of hardware failure or obselecence at data center scales.

robertclaus2• 9 months ago

If this math added up, wouldn't solar panels and radiators on earth solve the same problem?

thesuitonym• 9 months ago

Solar panels on Earth only get sunlight half the day. The idea is still dumb, but not for that reason.

fxtentacle• 9 months ago

„plans to build“

So far, it’s just a dream that convinced some investors to part with their money.

torginus5• 9 months ago

Altman: has stake in nuclear power and AI companies

Also Altman: Let's build gigawatts of nuclear for AI

Musk: has stake in space and AI companies

Also Musk: Let's build AI datacenters in space

caminante8• 9 months ago

Starcloud is the concept I'll show my friends that datacenters have hit peak hype.

Can't wait for an alien to NIMBY one of these.

yborg• 9 months ago

This. We really have hit Internet bubble hype levels, this could be a Silicon Valley episode. "My pitch deck is one slide. 'It's AI... IN SPACE!'"

dzhiurgis• 9 months ago

No need to wait for nimby. Plenty of people unhappy about rocket launches.

Add the fact it's going to host AI and crypto and some will even call it fascism and try to move out (not sure where tho).

pipe01• 9 months ago

This isn't a musk idea though, is it?

torginus5• 9 months ago

Not sure, but the Star-something naming and the video prominently featuring Starships suggests he'll be involved.

caminante8• 9 months ago

/uj Apparently, this has already been discussed a few times on HN, last year. The bubble is still expanding!

black6• 9 months ago

I still like Keith Lofstrom's Server Sky concept.

http://server-sky.com/ServerSky

ur-whale• 9 months ago

Cooling will be a real bitch.

Shielding also.

And latency.

hackmiester• 9 months ago

And don’t get me started on the remote hands fees. You thought DigitalRealty was bad!

Gazoche3• 9 months ago

And power, maintenance, cost...

tmvphil5• 9 months ago

How is a multiple square-kilometer radiator not just an inevitable Kessler syndrome disaster?

Edit: Some back of the envelope calculation suggests that the total cross-sectional area of all man-made orbiting satellites is around 55000 m^2. Just one 4km x 4km = 1600000m^2 starcloud would represent an increase by a factor of about 300. That's insane.

caminante8• 9 months ago

Sounds like a "slippery slope" fallacy without further explanation.

tmvphil5• 9 months ago

Not sure what the slippery slope is here. The linked page imagines a 4km x 4km radiator/solar array. The cross-sectional area of the array is going to be directly proportional to the probability of impacting high velocity space debris. In such an event the amount of debris that would be generated could also scale with the area of the array. This seems bad

skywhopper2• 9 months ago

“The only cost on the environment will be on the launch, then there will be 10x carbon-dioxide savings over the life of the data center”

And how long is that life exactly? There is zero chance this is a net positive for carbon emissions, much less a remotely economical way to build or operate datacenters.

deviation• 9 months ago

Replacing faulty nodes or equipment in space seems totally reasonable... It's not like getting faulty drives replaced in my datacenter racks don't already take weeks/months...

igleria• 9 months ago

This cannot possibly end well (flipped bits, maintenance, cooling).

If they fulfill their promise within 10 years I'll change careers to kiwi farming. I promise.

outside1234• 9 months ago

We have officially "jumped the shark." If this had been posted on April 1st I would have laughed at this and said "great joke guys."

Gazoche3• 9 months ago

I've barely started reading the post, but

“In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy”

Low cost???????? Sending a solar array into space would probably rank among the most expensive forms of energy production.

Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink.

Well, good luck getting the heat out first. I hope you planned for some big radiators to go along your 5GW solar array.

igor47• 9 months ago

Yeah especially considering the next line is:

Constant exposure to the sun in orbit also means nearly infinite solar power

Is it an infinite heat sink or an infinite power source?!

storus• 9 months ago

Basic datacenter technicians will be the new astronauts, swapping burnt CPUs and failed hard drives in space.

dominicm• 9 months ago

Wow, this is embarrassing. Hard to read.

Geee3• 9 months ago

The rate of radiative cooling scales proportionally to (T^4-Tenv^4) which approximates to just T^4 in space (Tenv = 3K). The hotter they can run it, the smaller heatsinks they need; for every doubling of temperature, the heatsink area can be reduced by a factor of 16. Also, it might be possible to boost the output temperature, e.g. with a chemical heat pump for even smaller heat sinks.

amelius2• 9 months ago

If they send billions of dollars of GPU cards into space, how are they going to secure it, physically?

shpx• 9 months ago

Everyone who puts up a persistent bright dot in the night sky should compensate everyone who has to see it with 1 cent for the sensory pollution.

ge96• 9 months ago

crazy how tiny the servers are compared to the panels

burnte2• 9 months ago

I have yet to meet a hardware engineer who thinks this is a good idea. I'm REALLY struggling to see benefits.

baggachipz• 9 months ago

Pumping your stock.

Klemoniono2• 9 months ago

I want that type of money for playing out something which can be pre calculated and is just not a smart idea at the moment at all.

I don't get it. I really don't.

You can calculate the minimum cost, you can calculate heat, maintenance and probably also the expected failerrate for the hardware.

But even if the failerrate is something you need to figure out, that would probably some R&D thing which you would test and verify in a very small and cheap setup.

Same stupid shit with the mirror in space which will send sun back to some PV panels on earth.

Cool stuff in a non capitalistic system but otherwise it just shows that plenty of people have too much money to invest in weird things without understanding it at all.

Klemoniono2• 9 months ago

btw. this is dishonest regarding sustainability.

Water consumption of a data center is not a real thing. You don't just consume water. You need it to move heat and you don't need it to remove heat by vaporization.

You can easily use this heat if you actually wanted to do so by heating houses close by or for chemical processes.

Its a legal issue.

And its very resource heavy to put anything in space...

bilekas• 9 months ago

“In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy,”

Wouldn't you know, you COULD get the same energy here too.

sketchysandwich• 9 months ago

Even if the some how solved the cooling problem others mentioned.

What happens when this data center becomes obsolete? we've just got a 4km wide piece of junk floating above earth now?

charliebwrites• 9 months ago

So when a storage device or a GPU burns out, how do you replace it?

Fly an astronaut to space..?

runlevel1• 9 months ago

Their numbers strike me as very optimistic:

    *Table 1. Cost comparison of a single 40 MW cluster operated for 10 years in space vs on land.*

    | Cost Item                     | Terrestrial                     | Space
    |:------------------------------|:--------------------------------|:----------------
    | Energy (10 years)             | $140m @ $0.04 per kWh           | $2m cost of solar array
    | Launch                        | None                            | $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators)
    | Cooling (chiller energy cost) | $7m @ 5% of overall power usage | More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space
    | Water usage                   | 1.7m tons @ 0.5L/kWh            | Not required
    | Enclosure (Sat. Bus/Building) | Approximately equivalent cost   | Approximately equivalent cost
    | Backup power supply           | $20m                            | Not required
    | All other DC hardware         | Approximately equivalent cost   | Approximately equivalent cost
    | Radiation shielding           | Not required                    | $1.2m @ 1 kg of shielding per kW of compute and $30/kg launch cost
    | Cost Balance                  | $167m                           | $8.2m

Source: Page 4 of their whitepaper https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

MrZander• 9 months ago

$5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators)

This seems absurdly low to me.

gs173• 9 months ago

It is, unless you take Musk's hype about Starship as fact. With rockets that are actually potentially available the best price is $1500/kg to LEO, so either they're presuming the whole setup weighs in at 3-4 tons (which is less than the shielding alone) or that they can get it launched for a few orders of magnitude less than what's on the market now (and they do say they assume $30/kg).

taikahessu• 9 months ago

All these calculations (of feasibility and maintenance challenges) are fascinating, but really just silly.

Of course we are going to use AI and robots, like AI robots, and stuff. It's going to be fully self-operating and the future!

But more seriously, thanks for great learning experiences about space to HN commenters.

drunx2• 9 months ago

I'm by no means closer or educated enough on astrophysics or anything to do with space. Hence I have a very "commoner" question:

- asteroids? Debris? It's there even any risk of anything significantly big to be damaged by something flying by?

"About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface."

I assume a good old "Prius" might have opinions about such construction of it flies through it.

But I guess "space is big", risks are low?

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...

porphyra• 9 months ago

The solar array is 4 km by 4 km. The whole Earth, with its 6400 km radius, only gets hit by a Prius-sized asteroid once per year. So the risks are much lower. I guess the array may be hit by many micro-asteroids though, but it should be possible to engineer some level of tolerance for that.

drunx2• 9 months ago

Yeah.. right after writing the comment I went on to get my frame of reference a bit adjusted about the sizes of everything...:) Risks are very small! So small that it's not even worth worrying about it too much. The whole cooling/heat transfer reality check is way more critical here than anything else indeed.

t1234s• 9 months ago

Strange their rendering is not exactly starship but its starship.

wildylion• 9 months ago

Oh, cool... I have only one question (that is not cool at all): how are they about to exhaust 5GW of waste heat?

asimpleusecase• 9 months ago

I could see gov imaging satellites with a direct encrypted laser communications to GPU’s in orbit being attractive. Images processing, movement pattern analysis, multi spectral, and as they mentioned radar.

NoPicklez3• 9 months ago

This is a super basic question, how do they prevent the panels from being hit my space debris or rocks, floaties etc?

Is it just that within its orbit there are next to no objects it could collide with, even small ones?

Starcloud

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