| ▲ | hedora an hour ago | |
I think there are at least a few problems with the math’s assumptions: 1) Don’t the radiators need to have more surface area than the solar? (Unless the chips run very hot.) 2) The datacenter will have the pesky earth between it and the sun some fraction of the time, and have to either shut down or run off batteries. ~50%, assuming LEO, right? If you leave LEO, then the latency sucks, so they’re training-only clusters. At 50% the solar doubles and you need 370 megawatt hours per hour of darkness, or you run the machines 50% of the time, rebooting for each orbit. If you make the orbit shorter (so you can have smaller batteries), then they wear out faster. The batteries also emit heat. Plus, you need to double the solar so they charge while the workload is running. 3) How do they cope with cosmic rays? The standard approach is still to duplicate or triplicate all computation, or use larger/slower processes, right? The obvious answer to each question makes the engineering design at least twice as dumb, and they stack. There are many other problems like these. | ||