Iโm catching up on the news today and see that Nvidia forecasts $1T in GPU sales over the next 18 months. That is crazy. I donโt know how that works at any level.
Also on the nvidia news front, they are making a version of the gpu for orbital datacenters. Now Iโve been around for a long, long time and Iโve heard some pretty dumb ideas in that time, and I feel like orbital datacenters is at least in the top 10.
Encase in lead obvsly
Fun story!
I worked in a sw eng (for real, not MSCE "we're engineers" way) research facility in uni and we had lots of guest lecturers. My fav. one was from NASA. Back in the first half of the shuttle program, the avionics were still pretty basic. One of the problems they had was radio LoS or loss of signal - if they weren't receiving any vox from Houston, was it because they were LoS or was the radio bork? And unlike almost every other system on an air or space craft,
1/
there wasn't really any kind of radio self-test - or rather you might be able to tell if the radio equipment was working, but what if there was an antennae problem. So a piece of mind to the crew would be to know - without the usual statement of that fact FROM Houston ON the radio - where they were vs. radio coverage.
Problem is, none of the computers on the original avionics had that capability - this was, after all,
2/
So anyway knowing where they were over earth or vs. the radio coverage wasn't in the avionics at the time. So someone hacked together a crude world map visualization and they ploted the orbiter's position on it as well as the radio coverage map. They found a lighteight compact 286 or whatever laptop to run it on.
4/
Exceeept, the cockpit didn't have a north american 120V AC outlet for the adapter. While they had got permission to bring a laptop, they did NOT get permission to bodge an AC inverter into the all-DC craft busses or directly wire the laptop barrel connector. So each crew member had to sacrifice a portion of their personnal effects weight budget to bring spare, charged laptop batteries, enough for the entire trip.
5/
The last problem (Im getting to it) was occasionally they'd experience weird and random glitches in the program; they'd be solved with a restart, but then they'd have to reenter the shuttles current location, alt and velocity manually (it could approximate from there) which was a pain, but it was assumed that this was caused by RAMdom bitflipping because the Compaq's memory wasn't core memory. Easily solved, future missions
6/
they cracked the laptop case and foiled the inside of it with gold foil or whatever they used to wrap satellites.
And of course later avionics updates made this all unnecessary. This - and other stories - were from the one guy (I've never seen a 3rd party corroboration), so it could be a tall tail, but a) why would someone make that story up?
7/
It's easier and cheaper to put a data centre in a volcano than in space. And it takes less time to realise it doesn't work there, and melts after a few minutes.
@Artemis201 @Lily_and_frog @ferrix @jerry
Hyperloop data! Cue boring company!
@Lily_and_frog @ferrix @Artemis201 @jerry
Well, on my "James Bond supervillain" scale, "inside a volcano" beats "in space".
@ferrix @Artemis201 @aredridel @jerry
Ahaโฆ THAT's the reason for the wall of lava lamp at the Cloudflare offices.
Yes, how would they dispose of waste heat? They're in a perfect vacuum!
Or disperse waste heat by venting gas. Not a good solution, though!
So youโre saying that we clone Elon Muskโs ego?
Maybe it is just a concept of a GPU. Elon Musk farts out the stupidest idea in the world and the funny money casino spins another round. Consider how much money the tech Bros have and how much ketamine they ingest on a daily basis.
My uninformed speculation is that space datacenters won't need to worry about being torched by the hordes of starving unemployed peasants. That may be the appeal of the idea.
@Artemis201 @jerry what about Europa? You've got geothermal for power, vast amount of cold liquid water, and built in radiation shielding. It's perfect!
Based on my extensive experience playing Barotrauma, nothing can go wrong.
(Former) space scientist here. I know nothing about datacenter engineering, but I agree that it's hard to imagine a worse environment to put anything that you want to keep functioning.
In related news, my RTX3090 cooked and I'm very sad.
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