lemmydividebyzeroDatacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
My question is always how the hell are you going to cool them. Do you know hard it is to move heat in a vacuum?
The problems; plural; is that the person who popularized the idea of data centers in space has little to zero understanding of any of the space sciences and yet owns and directs one of the world’s largest, and privately owned, aerospace companies with massive government contracts that splits its time with their own AI work.
fallaciousBasis
AkasazhHave you never seen a movie set in space? Evrytime someone gets sucked into space they freeze. You saying every movie got it wrong?? Space is cold. Duh.
With radiators just like with every existing satellite system.
Very large scale datacenters would likely have some nasty fluid handling problems to solve.
Why Everyone Is Talking About Data Centers In Space
Yeah the amount of heat a data center vs a satellite your going to super heat the space in that orbit over time. It they are geostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
teftgeostationary then its even harder as the the data center doesn’t move away from the heat.
Geostationary would leave the satellite in shadow anytime it was night time over the part of the earth since a geostationary orbit is stationary in the sky over a given point at the equator.
That doesn’t solve any of the cooling problems just saying that you do get some shadow at geostationary orbits.
There are other orbits that get less shadow though.
Um, it doesn’t make the data center in orbit thing make sense, but a geostationary satellite absolute moves at high speed and does not stay in the same place in space.
The heat would be moving at the same speed. Though, that does mean it wouldn’t be any better in any other orbit.
Again, it doesn’t help the case, but just… no. The heat gets out of the spacecraft by radiating, and radiation doesn’t move in a circular orbit around Earth, it moves at speed of light outwards from where it started.
Heat energy is primarily dissipated as infrared light which moves at the speed of light. There is no way for space to accumulate heat. If that were the case the entire solar system would be unlivable. The IR emitted by satellites is truly negligible in comparison to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the sun.
Have you seen the size of the radiators on the ISS ? And that’s just what needed for cooling of body heat for 9 people and basic computer and support equipment.
A data center that is actively pumping out massive amounts of heat would need humongous radiator panels.
They’re called fins, not panels.
You seem rather dull.
They’re called fins. Not panels.
The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn’t matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.
I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.
And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don’t want them radiating onto each other.
Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!
A radiator. Next question?
What’s going to be performing convection to dissipate heat from the radiator in a manner to support the heat generated by an AI data center?
What part of radiator don’t you understand?
Tell me you don’t know how radiators actually work without telling me. They dissipate heat via convection through the air surrounding them or gasses in general. What does space lack a significant amount of?
Radiators also dissipate heat through…wait for it…radiation.
Yes, but radiating heat purely through IRR is much less efficient than radiating it through convection. While a radiator is the answer, it’s going to be horribly inefficient. Which is why I support them spending however many billions of dollars to put an AI datacenter in space, just so it can burn up and waste their money
Do you know how BIG they would have to be to dissipate a data center worth of heat to keep it as cool as on earth?
Do you?
Oh, you got me, turned it around. Oh dear, whatever will I do? Oh right, remark how you don’t know and should stop supporting a stupid idea in the first place.
A square kilometer in radiator surface area at 100C to emit 1 GW, in case you’re wondering.
Do you know how much heat they would need to retain?
To prevent any moisture that might be in the air inside the data center from condensing onto electronics. Admit it, it’s a stupid idea and stop defending it as a legitimate one.
They’re in space. There’s no humidity.
Wtf?
Yeah so there is some confusion here. The are radiators on cars or in houses, but those are more accurately heat exchangers. Then there are things like heat lamps, which are really IR radiators that convert electricity to infrared light that feels hot.
Most of the heat you feel at a camp fire is radiant from the flame, unless you are down wind and feeling some convective heat, but most of that heat goes straight up with the smoke.
There’s a difference certainly but do you think the people who seem to be floating this idea know the difference?
Hard to say, but they’ve been using resistive cooling In space a long time.
Also a tech ingredients made a neat video about building one and radiating heat out into space from the ground. It was cool to see what happened when it was cloudy and stopped working.
Radiative cooling is all you got in space.
What you don’t understand is the size requirements those radiators would need to have to cool an entire data center.
It’s conserved.
Zero effort shit post. Cool.
Do you ever make posts that demonstrate what your opinions are or what your own thoughts are or do you just like to talk about other people and put them down cuz it makes you feel better?
My opinion and thoughts: dunking on idiots online brings me joy.
So I guess the last one I suppose. If I just had to pick one.
They honestly come off as that sophomore in college that had a single class on something so are going around talking about it smugly. They complain about zero effort shit posts when they do the same thing.
You really don’t seem particularly bright. So I did the math, just to double check.
A 1 gigawatt datacenter radiating at 100C would need a square kilometer in radiator surface area to sufficiently reject/emit the heat.
But then you need energy. With solar panels you’d need 2-3 sq km to sustain 1 GW.
So… The math checks out. I don’t understand your arguments from ignorance.
ValmondObnoxious as he seems to be, he’s actually right, there will be no convection, but they’d radiate heat in a vacuum, by IR IIRC.
To do that they’d have to be filled with something other than something water based to be able to do that over a large area which would require constant maintenance to do so. It’s not easily feasible and I doubt people who want to do this or defend it realize that. I have to look it up but it takes Anhydrous Ammonia to perform that in the ISS. Like this is a bad idea and it fries my brain people trying to defend this.
Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed 20Kw of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.
It would be 20kW for each rack or two. The types of data centre deal they talk about these days are measured in GW of compute. That’s 50,000x just for 1GW.
These aren’t big things, they’re small satellites. They’re going to be ~100kW
How would you power them?
The surface area of solar panels exceeds the surface area needed for radiators to cool everything.
In space I would imagine you’d find the perfect sandwich ratio. One bun solar, one bun radiators, the meat being the racks.