| ▲ | tempestn 6 hours ago |
| That helps with the heat from the sun problem, but not the radiation of heat from the GPUs. Those radiators would need to be unshaded by the solar panels, and would need to be enormous. Cooling stuff in atmosphere is far easier than in vacuum. |
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| ▲ | bdamm 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Not so. Look at the construction of JWST. One side is "hot", the other side is very, very cold. I am highly skeptical about data centers in space, but radiators don't need to be unshaded. In fact, they benefit from the shade. This is also being done on the ISS. |
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| ▲ | tempestn 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's fair. I meant they would need a clear path to open space not blocked by solar panels, but yes, a hot and cold side makes sense. The whole concept is still insane though, fwiw. | | |
| ▲ | DoctorOetker 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | "I meant they would need a clear path to open space not blocked by solar panels, but yes, a hot and cold side makes sense." This is precisely why my didactic example above uses a convex shape, a pyramid. This guarantees each surface absorbs or radiates energy without having to take into account self-obscuring by satellite shape. |
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| ▲ | RIMR 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Look at how many layers of insulation are needed for the JWST to have a hot and cold side! Again, this is not particularly simple stuff. The JWST operates at 2kw max. That's not enough for a single H200. AI datacenters in space are a non-starter. Anyone arguing otherwise doesn't understand basic thermodynamics. | | |
| ▲ | DoctorOetker 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The goal of JWST is not to consume as much power as possible, and perform useful computations with it. A system not optimized for metric B but for metric A scores bad for metric B... great observation. |
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| ▲ | lm28469 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Look at the construction of JWST. A very high end desktop pulls more electricity than the whole JWST... Which is about the same as a hair dryer. Now you need about 50x more for a rack and hundreds/thousands racks for a meaningful cluster. Shaded or not it's a shit load of radiators https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-deliv... |
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| ▲ | DoctorOetker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| this makes no sense, the radiation of heat from the GPU's came from electrical energy, the electrical energy came from the efficient fraction of solar panel energy, the inefficient fraction being heating of the solar panel, the total amount of heat that needs to be dissipated is simply the total amount of energy incident on the solar panels. |
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