Comment by wat10000
13 hours ago
The pertinent thing is that it’s not an advantage. It may be doable but it’s not easier than cooling a computer in a building.
13 hours ago
The pertinent thing is that it’s not an advantage. It may be doable but it’s not easier than cooling a computer in a building.
The distinction is that you don't need to compete for land area, that you don't cause local environmental damage by heating say a river or a lake, that you don't compete with meatbags for energy and heat dissipation rights.
Without eventually moving compute to space we are going to have compute infringe on the space, energy, heat dissipation rights of meatbags. Why welcome that?!?
How efficient is thermal radiation through a vacuum again?
Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?
> How efficient is thermal radiation through a vacuum again?
I provided the calculation for the pyramidal shape: if the base of a pyramid were a square solar panel with side length L, then for a target temperature of 300K (a typical back of envelope substitute for "room temperature") the height of the pyramid would have to be about 3 times the side length of the square base. Quite reasonable.
> Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?
The Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us that whatever prevents us from putting GPU clusters in space, it's not the difficulty in shedding heat by thermal radiation that is supposedly stopping us.
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