Comment by moralestapia
3 months ago
This is not a giant space station ...
>There will be if launch costs get low enough to make any of this feasible.
I don't know what you mean by that.
3 months ago
This is not a giant space station ...
>There will be if launch costs get low enough to make any of this feasible.
I don't know what you mean by that.
> This is not a giant space station …
Fundamentally, it is, just in the form of a swarm. With added challenges!
> I don't know what you mean by that.
If you can get to space cheaply enough for an orbital AI datacenter to make financial sense, so can your security threats.
> Fundamentally, it is, just in the form of a swarm. With added challenges!
Right, in the same sense that existing Starlink constellation is a Death Star.
This paper does not describe a giant space station. It describes a couple dozen of satellites in a formation, using gravity and optics to get extra bandwidth for inter-satellite links. The example they gave uses 81 satellites, which is a number made trivial by Starlink (it's also in the blog release itself, so no "not clicking through to the paper" excuses here!).
(In a gist, the paper seems to be describing a small constellation as useful compute unit that can be scaled, indefinitely - basically replicating the scaling design used in terrestrial ML data centers.)
> Right, in the same sense that existing Starlink constellation is a Death Star.
"The cluster radius is R=1 km, with the distance between next-nearest-neighbor satellites oscillating between ~100–200m, under the influence of Earth’s gravity."
This does not describe anything like Starlink. (Nor does Starlink do heavy onboard computation.)
> The example they gave uses 81 satellites…
Which is great if your whole datacenter fits in a few dozen racks, but that's not what Google's talking about here.
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