Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s not speculation. Nvidia themselves have run experiments with GPUs in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography (eg newer chips).

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• MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Spacecraft software engineer here:

  They are and they aren’t. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won’t have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.

  Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it’s supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.

  The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there’s no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time

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• NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They already run AMD chips on starlink, so they’ve figured out someway to shield them in most cases. Some solar flares at bad times (something about while raising orbits) has nuked some dishes before.

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  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They’re shielded by being in a very low orbit. I don’t think that would work for a data center.

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    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      These are also going to be in a low orbit so they have good latency

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  • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Im pretty sure they are shielded as I think I have seen stuff like that for the electronics in the iss. Thing is that the eletronics in sattelites and the space station are pretty small relative to datacenters. The only benefit I can really see is maybe they can be solar powered which I guess if the panel acts as shielding and stays sun facing but all the extra expense of getting it up there. I just don’t see it as practical. I mean technically it should either work or not basedo on cost as long as they don’t wring out any subudies or soemthing.

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    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I think everyone is really confusing what these datacenters are.

      They aren’t these massive things. They’re going to be a little bigger than v3 starlinks all working together in some manner.

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      • HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        ugh so we are talking massive constellations. That is so much worse.

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