I'm surprised that Google has drunken the "Datacenters IN SPACE!!!1!!" kool-aid. Honestly I expected more.
It's so easy to poke a hole in these systems that it's comical. Answer just one question: How/why is this better than an enormous solar-powered datacenter in someplace like the middle of the Mojave Desert?
I think it's a good idea, actually.
A giant space station?
> no need for security
There will be if launch costs get low enough to make any of this feasible.
> no premises
Again… the space station?
> no water
That makes things harder, not easier.
>There will be if launch costs get low enough to make any of this feasible.
I don't know what you mean by that.
Fundamentally, it is, just in the form of a swarm. With added challenges!
> I don't know what you mean by that.
If you can get to space cheaply enough for an orbital AI datacenter to make financial sense, so can your security threats.
Right, in the same sense that existing Starlink constellation is a Death Star.
This paper does not describe a giant space station. It describes a couple dozen of satellites in a formation, using gravity and optics to get extra bandwidth for inter-satellite links. The example they gave uses 81 satellites, which is a number made trivial by Starlink (it's also in the blog release itself, so no "not clicking through to the paper" excuses here!).
(In a gist, the paper seems to be describing a small constellation as useful compute unit that can be scaled, indefinitely - basically replicating the scaling design used in terrestrial ML data centers.)
"The cluster radius is R=1 km, with the distance between next-nearest-neighbor satellites oscillating between ~100–200m, under the influence of Earth’s gravity."
This does not describe anything like Starlink. (Nor does Starlink do heavy onboard computation.)
> The example they gave uses 81 satellites…
Which is great if your whole datacenter fits in a few dozen racks, but that's not what Google's talking about here.
Irrelevant for spacecraft dynamics or for heat management. The problem of keeping satellites from colliding or shedding the watts the craft gets from the Sun are independent of the compute that's done by the payload. It's like, the basic tenet of digital computing.
> Which is great if your whole datacenter fits in a few dozen racks, but that's not what Google's talking about here.
Data center is made of multiplies of some compute units. This paper is describing a single compute unit that makes sense for machine learning work.
The more compute you do, the more heat you generate.
> Data center is made of multiplies of some compute units.
And, thus, we wind up at the "how do we cool and maintain a giant space station?" again. With the added bonus of needing to do a spacewalk if you need to work on more than one rack.