Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast … as it gets better, we’ll become too dependent.
“all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,”
Solar powered server farms in space. Self-powered, self-cooling, ‘outside the environment’. Is this a stupid idea?
Edit: So it would seem the answer is yes. Good chat :) Thanks.
Launch cost is astronomical.
Maintenance access is horrible.
Temperature delta is insane, upto 250C.
I don’t understand the self-cooling. Isn’t it harder to keep things cool in space since there is no conduction or convection cooling? I mean everything is in a vacuum. The only place for heat to go is radiative and that’s terribly inefficient. Seems like a massive engineering problem.
You can cool servers way better on Earth than you can in space. Down here you can transfer heat away from the server with conduction and convection, but in space you really only have radiation. Cooling spacecraft is an engineering challenge. One might imagine a server stuck inside a glass thermos that’s sitting out in the sun.
Afaik space isn’t self cooling. Overheating of spacecraft is a thing. I think they can only cool through infrared radiation or something.
Do you know how much energy you need to launch a kilogram into Earth orbit?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3990472/china-takes-edge-computing-to-orbit-with-first-space-based-processing-network.html
So someone thinks it’s not entirely stupid
very stupid. One of the most difficult things in space is cooling stuff. Sending up a bunch of space heaters in a box (almost all of the energy pumped into a computer is turned into heat. The actual computatiion takes next to nothing in comparison) is definitely not a good idea. Definitely not one thought up by a technical person.
I assume yes, I know very little but I know space is very hard and harsh environment. Also it would be very expensive I assume. And it would need to be big.
also, you can make computers much more cheap and reliable, more maintainable and much much faster, if you protect them from space radiation by operating them down here, under the protection of earth’s atmosphere.