> I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing.
FWIW there's a reason that Sweden has a bunch of datacenters in the north that are peanuts compared to hosting in Virginia.
They're "poorly" connected (by virtue of being a bit out of the way), but the free cooling and power from renewables make them extremely attractive. There was a time where they were the favourite of crypto-miners for the same reason as they would be attractive to AI training farms.
As for the meat of the paper. Anyone with a passing understanding of space will be quick to point out that:
A) Heat is a problem in space, it's either way-way-way to hot (IE; you're in the path of the Sun) or it's way-way-way too cold (IE; you're out of the sun) and the shift between the two means you need to build for both. You also can't dissipate heat as there's no air to take the heat away.
B) Power is not so abundant and solar panels degrade; a huge amount of satellite building is essentially managing a decline in the capability of hardware. That's part of why there are so many up there.
C) Getting reasonably sized hardware up there is beyond improbable, though I'll grant you that most of the weight in a computer is the cooling components and chassis.
D) Cosmic Rays. No electromagnetic barrier from earth and extremely tight lithographies. I mean... there's a reason NASA is still using CPU's measured in the megahertz range.
AFAIK someone (Mars Ingenuity helicopter team) discovered that some chips handle them much better than others, so they just test a bunch and keep resistant ones.
FWIW there's a reason that Sweden has a bunch of datacenters in the north that are peanuts compared to hosting in Virginia.
They're "poorly" connected (by virtue of being a bit out of the way), but the free cooling and power from renewables make them extremely attractive. There was a time where they were the favourite of crypto-miners for the same reason as they would be attractive to AI training farms.
Fortlax has some I believe; https://www.fortlax.se
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As for the meat of the paper. Anyone with a passing understanding of space will be quick to point out that:
A) Heat is a problem in space, it's either way-way-way to hot (IE; you're in the path of the Sun) or it's way-way-way too cold (IE; you're out of the sun) and the shift between the two means you need to build for both. You also can't dissipate heat as there's no air to take the heat away.
B) Power is not so abundant and solar panels degrade; a huge amount of satellite building is essentially managing a decline in the capability of hardware. That's part of why there are so many up there.
C) Getting reasonably sized hardware up there is beyond improbable, though I'll grant you that most of the weight in a computer is the cooling components and chassis.
D) Cosmic Rays. No electromagnetic barrier from earth and extremely tight lithographies. I mean... there's a reason NASA is still using CPU's measured in the megahertz range.