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Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue (tech.yahoo.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 2 months ago (11 children)

There is an unsolvable compute problem. The average PC on earth has multiple bit-flips a year from cosmic rays. The space hardened chips we use are 50nm and the chips used from inference are 4 to 6nm. 50nm is far more cosmic ray resistant than 6nm because of the transistor size. Are we supposed to think making H100s with a 65nm process is possible? The speed of light creates a die size limitation as well.

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

    Either that or they'd have to triplicate everything and have a voting system.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    this is the current real solution on the ISS - three main computers doing everything.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    They are not using 6nm process chips in the ISS. The computers themselves were made before that process existed. An off-the-shelf space hardened computer system uses 65nm process. Cosmic rays is a very general term, it covers basically everything that flies around in space, that includes sources like the sun, which is hammering everything in the solar system with rays. Outside of the atomsphere there are so many more cosmic rays that non-space hardened computers can not even make calculations. Combined with the difference between the bit flip rate when you make transistors 10 x smaller is also fucked up high. One CPU cycle will have enough erros to make the computer useless. It's a multi-faceted problem and when the largest limiting factor is weight & size, it can't be solved with scaling.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    The way I see it is they are doing inference, not transfiring bank account balances. I'd be curious to see some actual experimental data, but I'd expect LLMs to skip past bit flips same way you shrug and move on from spelling errors. At worst you can do your critical calculation in triplicate on your 6nm nodes (with redo upon dissensus) and reduce your bit error from 4/year (or 4000/year or whatever have you in orbit) to (4/year)^3

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

    I don't think you don't understand the difference between the amout of cosmic rays, which are basically any flying particle, on Earth compared to space. Small nodes would be dealing with multiple per cpu cycle. Multiple could be 1 million a second, I am trying to figure out a way to measure. It would be something like distance from atomsphere(rate of total particles) x probably of an object the size of a transitior getting hit(rate of collions). I could probably find the bit-flip rate for an off-the-shelf space resistant chip and infere the rate for the size I need, but there are other factors. A bit will not flip on every collision, shrinking transistors exponentially increases this.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    There’s various ways from better shielding to redundancy to error checking everything.

    This is actually why I hope they do pursue this stupidity. We do need to figure out how to goto the next level of computing for everything we do in space. If the folly of “datacenters in space” helps them figure out reliable computing despite radiation and lack of cooling then we win

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    You have two options for shielding, one is shield the entire thing like we do with the ISS because people live there and radiation is bad for living cells. Two is to shield the smallest unitary entities to use the least amout of materials, like a shield per chip. This is physics not magic, radiation does not just go away. When everything add to launch weight it does not make sense. Redundancy systems also add to launch weight.

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