Comment by svantana
3 hours ago
The joint solar panel + computer system will be pretty close to an ideal black body, which near earth will have an average temperature of about 10°C. And radiation is an issue, but starlink seems to work so I don't see why this wouldn't.
Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.
You make a H100, ship it to a space dock, load it onto a rocket (rocket requires fuuel, the rocket, etc.) send it up, deploy it, monitor it live 24/7, have means of adjusting its orbit, if it breaks, its immediade full loss, otherwise it will degenerate faster in space than on earth, now it needs a high speed up/downlink to do anything reasonable which also requires a base station. The base station has to track this satelite.
One H100 costs 40k, consumes 700 Watt peak and need probably at a minimum 5 square meter of area for cooling and solar.
The colossus datacenter from musk has 250.000 of these.
Now you have to track 250.000 single satelites, you have to coordinate the communication between the, up and downlink to earth.
250.000 * 5 square meter of area.
This alone increases the potential debris in space.
And this is ONE 300 MW Datacenter replacement. ONE.
More energy will be required than radiation absorbed by a spherical (ish) data center. You'll have massive solar panels piping energy in, and so the temperature would by higher than thermal equilibrium at that distance.
Starlink does not need so much energy as a datacenter.
I don't follow your logic. I mentioned starlink as an example of transistors (and solar panels) in space dealing with radiation.
Well I was talking about heat. But regarding radiation, there is a long history of transistors in space dealing with radiation. But ... there is also a whole science how to deal with making it reliable: answer, expensive redundancy.
And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced.
If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.