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

As someone with actual experience working in datacenters, this shit needs constant maintenance and repair. You can't afford to pay for my travel expenses to reboot a server.

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

    There's a bunch of sealed underwater data centres and they found reliability went right up (see Project Natick). Underwater has the benefit of actually having cooling though ..

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  • [–] 26 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Yet Microsoft abandoned the idea because it was so fraught with commercialisation issues. Which is exactly what the experts are saying

    Can't maintain, can't upgrade, can't repair, it pollutes the environment with abandoned shit and it doesn't scale

    Reliability probably went up because of the extra expense put into making sure it won't immediately fail and need to be repaired

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not saying the space data centres are a good or even viable idea, just saying you can improve the reliability significantly if you try. The space data centre planis a non starter, there's nowhere for the heat to go.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, investing in reliability will increase reliability

    You can radiate the heat with a biiiig long radiator but it doesn't solve any of the other problems or improve commercial scalability

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  • [–] -4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

    You may note that this thread is talking about data centre reliability ..

    Also you can't radiate heat in space ..

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

    The ISS has 475m^2 of ammonia filled radiators that like to disagree with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Hypothetically, a relatively stationary (not doing a lot of accelerating and decelerating) "Space Datacenter" would be a perfect test bed for something like Curie point radiators. Might help with the size of radiator needed to produce the same effect, but that's probably the least difficult problem with that environment. The radiation shielding you would need would be... well astronomical.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, I've been wondering why there's such a push against the feasibility of space data centers on a lack of cooling when it's in a vacuum where we have already solved temperature regulations. Are there good arguments for why this doesn't work for data centers in space? I mean I imagine other concerns will definitely make it difficult but this argument hasn't seemed accurate to me. I mean also I'm against data centers in general so ya know fuck them but from a reality pov like isn't that argument incorrect?

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Also you can’t radiate heat in space …

    How does the Sun work?

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

    Mostly emitting ungodly amounts of photons and radiations, as far as the earth is concerned. Is that actually cooling it though ?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Yes, all that emitted radiation does cool down the sun. It's why it has a mostly stable temperature instead of getting hotter infinitely.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Oh so youre saying we should convert the heat generated by the data centres to wide spectrum EM and emit that instead? Amazing! There should be no issues with outputting watts or kilowatts of EM from each of these assuredly numerous space data centres.

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

    You can't reboot a server remotely? My vast experience having been in one collocation once made me think that surely in big datacentres each server has a remotely controllable switch on its power source, like something that comes integrated with the rack itself? Is that not a thing?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    You can't remotely replace hardware.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Did I say "replace"? Oh, sorry, I meant "reboot". Must have been distracted when I typed that. Silly me.

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