Comment by dgfl
2 months ago
The existence of starlink proves that this is false. Look at most current pitches, they don’t talk about GW-class monsters anymore. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a 20-30kW satellite bus the size of starlink (or I guess up to 100kW? once starship is available - it’s all about payload fairing diameter) from hosting ~1 rack of compute and antennas. The economics may or may not make sense, we’ll have to see.
There’s very little research work needed to make this happen; it’s all about engineering some satellite buses and having them fly in close formation to get a “data center”. And this group of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit would relay to a comms constellation e.g. starlink itself) and operate as a global scale data center. The heat management and orbital mechanics are all straight forward really.
I've heard this before. A datacenter and a starlink sattelite are not in the same ballpark of power usage and heat dissipation needs. The are orders of magnitude off from each other.
The point is that you don’t need to put a whole datacenter into a single satellite. You can put a single rack per satellite and have different racks communicate via antennas, laser links, or perhaps even wires since they’ll be launched in groups of 10-50 anyway. You could also dock them to each other, but that’s not necessarily needed.
I don't understand what makes these "datacenters" if they're distributed across satellites with WAN-esque interconnect.
Are we overloading the term "datacenter"? Or is it not overloaded but somehow able to achieve datacenter-like speeds / (tail) latency even when distributed across satellites?
Ok, but then what's the point? How is having a small amount of compute in space useful?
It's worth noting that GPUs have a much higher failure rate than traditional CPUs. Over 10x the failure rate due thermal stress. The amount of heat generated is very different. You can't really replace a GPU in a satellite (at least today?) which would place most of these satellites as space debris in a ~5 year horizon.
Usually satellites utilize an older node as newer nodes are easily bit-flipped by radiation. And blocking radiation is heavy.
AI calcs may handle wrong calculations better than cpus where software will tend to panic.
Which is the same lifetime as a starlink sat
So what exactly is the benefit of having that thing in orbit then, where it costs you millions of dollars to put it there?
12 replies →
"Space datacenter" -> overpriced starlink with some shitty edge compute -> "look guys, we built a space datacenter; earnings results to follow" -> number go up.
I don’t think Sun synchronous orbit is possible except in LEO.
LEO is high risk and star link satellites deorbit or burn up all the time. Not good from a capex POV on graphics cards.
How much power could we get out of the fuel required to launch a 20-100kW rack in to space, if we were to burn it on the ground?