Ah yes: computation. Famous for annihilating water. Every bit you flip consumes an H2O molecule.

kennywinker 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, how do you cool servers in space then?

Evaporative cooling is the way it happens down on earth - and that shuttles h2o molecules from dense useful clumps like aquifers and rivers to a less useful form spread out in the air. But evaporating h2o isn’t an option in space afaik - since there’s a shortage of air to take up the h2o. In fact I think radiative cooling is the only actual option in space.

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MrMorden 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's the neat thing: you don't, or at least not in the megawatt range. A kilowatt can be done with radiative cooling but doesn't get you far with a hypothetical datacenter satellite.

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kennywinker 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So, somehow the servers can run hot in space without a problem?

	▲	MrMorden 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No; if you try to do this you don't launch in the first place because the amount of servers required to be useful can't be cooled within your payload budget.

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etc-hosts 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My job is mostly worrying about cooling paths, maintenance, power, heat transfer, lifetime of GPUs, and high performance networks. NVIDIA partner. I can drive to the datacenter. This stuff BARELY works here on Earth. Especially thermal issues.

Looking forward to watching spacex defeat physics.