zlacker

>>jonbae+(OP)
Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost savings from the "free" solar power.

More discussion: >>43977188

>>Reuben+o1
You've also got the problem of cosmic radiation flipping bits. Your fault tolerant architecture probably mitigates this with redundancy, with the extra servers again eating into the purported advantages of extra solar power. Dealing with the PITA of single event upsets is something developers of edge data processing software in space put up with to avoid the latency issues that data clouds in space introduce

>>notaha+W6
I wonder if "normal" RDIMM ECC would be enough to mitigate most of those radiation bit-flipping issues. If so it wouldn't really make a difference to earth-based servers since most enterprise servers use RDIMM ECC too

>>preiss+Xh
You'll get bitflips elsewhere besides just in RAM. A bitflip in L1 or L3 cache will be propagated to your DIMM and noone will be the wiser.

>>eptcyk+9t
Sun Microsystems famously had this problem with their servers using the UltraSPARC II chips, with cache SRAM that didn’t have ECC. Later versions of their processors had ECC added.