Which means either the United States has or will be doing this, and this offers humanity no comfort. Exponential feedback loops on a road to nowhere on tracks coming to an end. There is no reason to be hopeful. Every little discovery, every little innovation all goes to the military industrial complex of all countries just to slaughter poor people. China is a capitalist country, Russia is a capitalist country, Iran is a capitalist country, Israel is a capitalist country, the United States is a capitalist country, Europe is full of capitalist countries. No War but the Class War.
Because electronics on the ground didn’t have a big enough environmental footprint, let’s emit co2 and pollutants to have some more in space? All just because checks notes no real useful reason?
It eliminates the need for a lot of back and forth communication if you need to calculate stuff in space. Maybe scanning satelite images for example. And it shaves off valuable seconds if you - say - want to launch something from orbit to Earth. Most air defense mechanisms are not all that effective against stuff that comes straight down at a high speed and the idea of orbital weapons has been circulating for a while now (if not realised without public knowledge).
it seems a bit disingenuous to call these “data centers in space” or “super computers”.
30 terabytes of storage across 12 satellites? So 2.5 TB each and 744 tops (which is like, a modern mid range graphics card for a PC, the RX 9070 XT does 1557 tops for reference). Like that just sounds like they’re launching a powerful PC in to orbit. Like, that’s a lot of power for a satellite, for comparison the curiosity rover is using the same kind of CPU as a 2000 era imac G3, but it’s not a data center.
The idea of doing more processing of the data on the satellite rather than processing it on the ground is interesting and neat, but representing these as anything more than that is… weird.
12 of 2800 planned have been launched.
I have a server at home built from old parts and some refurbished drives with nearly as much storage as the currently launched satellites. 2800 satellites like this would come out to around 230 of my servers, or ~7PB.
A single 2U server with 12 drives, each with 24TB storage, can hold 288TB. It would take ~24 of those to get to 7PB, which is a lot of servers, but not so many that someone with quite a lot of savings couldn’t afford it.
Also, the servers on the ground can be cooled by, idk, air if needed. Or water. Or I guess liquid nitrogen if you want. Point is there’s an atmosphere for the heat to dissipate to, unlike space.
They’ve certainly had to come up with some way to effectively radiate the heat into space. The article doesn’t mention it though. i presume it’s one of the main reasons for networking so many machines together?
That’s still not very much compared to most data centers. Like, 7000 terabytes is a lot of storage for one person, but it barely even registers compared to most modern data centers.
Also, 2800 desktops networked together isn’t really a super computer or a data center.
such a network is interesting as a scientific tool for gathering and processing data, certainly, but not a data-center and not a super computer.
Imagine the latency on a data center in space. Uplink/downlink every time your server gets an inferencing request? Lol.
I could see it being fine for longer running asynchronous requests, but that would be if the cost/benefit made any sense at all, and if the servers had any resources worth talking about.
I thought this was going to be unviable because cooling megawatts of power passively by radiation alone is hard? That’s been overcome somehow then? The article just says “Orbital data centres can use solar power and radiate their heat to space”.
I did wonder in the past about using a large heat pump to make the heat fins much hotter, which should accelerate cooling. But just an armchair thought. Any info on how this is/will be cooled?
edit: I also wonder what happens when an SSD goes bad… do they just expect storage capacity to decrease over time, or is there some maintenance mechanism to send up fresh drives? So many questions…
These are likely only using a few kilowatts, calling them data centers or super computers is an absurd hyperbole.
I would imagine some sort of heat pump is being used to transfer the heat from the electronics to the radiators. I still wonder how they’re dealing with the heat.
Fun fact, this isn’t all that effective because of the compressor heat/inefficiency. You get some benefit, but you also introduce moving parts and complexity.
You’re absolutely right. Ive seen a few mentions of research into phase changing materials for heat transfer, but I think the technology is still in its infancy. Would be cool to see a static PCM heat exchanger. Might be possible to leverage sun exposure/shading for more favorable ∆T? Been a bit since senior Heat Transfer.
PCMs are already used but also have their limits. They’re heavy and only help if you’re consistently going through temperature swings like behind Earth’s shadow. Depending on your Beta angle, which changes as the earth revolves around the sun and your orbit precesses, you could be exposed to sun 24/7, so PCM wouldn’t help much.
LOTS of radiators.
Seems like ocean supercomputers would be more viable…
Hard reboots/power cycling are gonna be a real pain in the ass. I suspect that there’s gonna be significant downtimes until they switch from Windows to Linux and then figure out their super space drivers. Considering the millions it costs to launch someone into space, the IT astronaut who has to unplug this and plug it back in is going to be the most expensive tech support/hour ever.
What could go wrong?
Literally everything
Nah, as long as it has Quantum and AI it’ll be fine
No blockchain to keep it tethered to the floor
The beginnings of the Matrioshka Brain
We just keep inching closer and closer to Planetes instead of Star Trek
That is certainly a description…
On a routine debris collection run, Yuri Mihairokov finds a compass, the only keepsake of his deceased wife, and is rescued by Hachirota “Hachimaki” Hoshino. Pilot Fee Carmichael stops the terrorist plan by ramming the Toy Box into the satellite and knocking it off course, sacrificing the Toy Box in the process.
What terrorist plot? What does that have to do with the compass?
All I can say is that the Wiki article is not representative of the show or the manga.
I forgot that anime existed
“Professor Klaus, no! The results have not been confirmed!”
I hope they don’t assemble it ‘The Verge Way’
Skynet is Made in China. That figures.
