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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says AI compute in space will be the lowest-cost option in 5 years — but Nvidia's Jensen Huang says it's a 'dream' (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/hardware@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 11 months ago (5 children)

That's not how space works though. It's a vacuum. It doesn't work the same way as on earth. What temperature do you think the side pointing to sun is? And what temperature do you think the side that is away from the sun is? Heat is just not going to magically transfer into space.

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  • [–] -3 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    There's nothing magical about heat transfer.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/07/all-radiators.html

    You are right in that it is simple, but it is simple in the worst way; you can't just shed heat in space. You have to convert it and radiate it away, which takes infrastructure and power. If the ISS had the compute capacity of a datacenter, the required radiators would engulf the station.

    Also, datacenters are manned. Things break. In space, you need to either leave the earth's protective magnetosphere or do constant station-keeping because you're close to the atmosphere. If you leave the magnetosphere, you have to shield all of your electronics which adds a lot of weight and you can forget using the latest CPUs because they can't handle the high energy particle bombardment, even with shielding.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Yes there is. You need to be able to transfer heat to something else. It doesn't just magically disappear. Space is a vacuum. I think you watch too many movies. You probably think that people will just instantly freeze in space without gear on.

    I'll give you an example. Do you have one of those water bottles that can keep your drink cold for like a day? The space in between is a vacuum. Why do you think that the liquid inside can say so cold for so long? It's the same principle. Imagine a data center floating around in this space, there is nowhere for the heat to go.

    The reason why earth is warm is because the sun radiates and heats up the ground on earth. This is also why it's colder the higher you go within the first few layers of our atmosphere and hotter near the ground.

    Basically, you have to radiate heat away from the data center in this case or transfer heat to one area or the other. It's not as simple as being like, hey space, take my heat will you? There is nothing to transfer it to.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Yes there is.

    Oh okay. In that case , it's cooled with magic. 🪄

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago*

    The only real way to do heat transfer in space is through infrared. But that is not very efficient, so most compute in space is managed to reduce heat as much as possible. Data centers, or even just a few 2-4u servers with GPUs produce significantly more heat.

    What if the craft is in the sun? Then, you not only have to dump the heat from the onboard servers, but also the sun. These changes are rapid, and not easily managed. Plus, the cold side would still need something to radiate into. Heat does not transfer the same way in a vacuum, even closed loop systems on the ground need air to dump heat into. And these companies don't even want to use that because it's not efficient, so they waste our water instead.

    Make it make sense.

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