Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 7 hours agoThey aren’t making a datacenter like on earth. They’re putting up a ton of satellites that will each generate about 100kW.
Everyone keeps thinking they’re putting these massive things up there, they are not doing that.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
That’s interesting, but what’s the point? If it’s like 2 DGX boxes in each satellite, spaced out, the interconnect between them is going to be very slow, and the individual computational power of each satellite will not be that impressive.
And if you connect them all in one constructed mesh and wire them together, well, you’ve made a 200MW datacenter! The economies remain the same.
If hardware gets more power efficient, well… Then why do you need to go to space anymore?
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Ya, the economies of how much total space / material for the global network is similar, although lets say higher due to losses in efficiency in distributing it over so many dishes, but in terms of how big any individual radiator is and how much space each one is going to take, the smaller sizes make it easier to manage. Trying to figure out a 150-200m^2^ solar panel is a lot easier than trying to figure out a 1km^2^
The individual power of each satellite having to use a mesh network to train might not be fast enough, maybe they’ll still use land based ones for training, but no single person needs more compute than what a satellite can provide. So from the inference / customer computation side of things, it isn’t a problem.