Indeed. There's another point that's been missed in the "superconductor"
suggestion: Why do we get the heat in the first place?
Superconductors are great when it comes to reducing resistive losses in
long and / or high current conductors (power distribution, MRI magnets,
...). But this isn't why computer chips get hot. Let me take you back to
your Physics 101 when you learned that Power P was the product of
current I and voltage V. A logic chip like a CPU is nothing but an
assortment of gazillions of little switches. When a switch is open, it
may have voltage across it but no current flows: no power gets
dissipated. If it's closed, current may flow but there won't be any
voltage across it. Also not a source of power loss.
The power loss (heat generation) happens when the little switches are
switching, i.e., when they are between open and closed and when there is
both a bit of voltage and a bit of current present. Naively you might
say that a switch is either on or off, and so that shouldn't occur, but
in both theory and practice, an instantaneous loss-free switching
process requires a signal of infinite bandwidth when subjected to
Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis allows us to model any signal as a
combination of sinusoidal signals of different frequency, amplitude and
phase, and it's in particular the high-and-in-the-direction-of-infinity
frequency components of that combination that are needed for the
"ïnstantaneous"switching. Unfortunately, in any real circuit of larger
than zero size, reactive elements (capacitive and inductive components
or parasitic properties of that nature) attenuate these. So the only
real switching we can actually do in real life is switching that
dissipates power when it happens - no matter whether the chip is built
using superconductors or not.
In a modern CPU, a significant percentage of gates are this this "gray"
in-between state between 0 and 1 for a significant part of the time,
which is why you need elaborate cooling fans and water coolers etc., and
it's also why clock frequencies haven't increased substantially in
recent years.
On 21/04/2023 12:06 am, Dave Collier-Brown via Starlink wrote:
Another point they missed: on earth, we can use conductive cooling and
transfer the heat from the machines to a flow of air. In space, we
can only use radiative cooling, and we need to be out of the sun to
have enough temperature difference.
--dave
On 4/20/23 07:10, Hesham ElBakoury via Starlink wrote:
The article about the ASCEND project says:
"Very low ambient temperatures in space will dramatically reduce the
need for cooling equipment that consumes enormous amounts of energy.
A significant part of a data center’s energy use is for cooling
equipment, accounting for more than 50% in some facilities.
Temperatures can be as low as -292°F (-180°C) when an orbiting object
is in the Earth’s shadow."
Hesham
On Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 10:44 PM Daniel Schien
<[email protected]> wrote:
I assume any object in orbit will be hidden from the sun some of
the time. So, the machines will require some pretty big battery
to go up with them.
I'd like to also know what the launch cost is.
Tom Segert estimates in his LinkedIn post, for a 100kg satellite
payload:
"TL:DR ~57 ton CO2e for a typical ESA satellite (including Ariane
6 launch), <15t CO2e for a satellite built in a factory and
launched with a re-usable rocket."
Depending on the type of server that should go up there, this is
a fair amount of carbon to offset from brighter sunlight.
The article also gets the carbon footprint wrong:
"Data centers are big energy consumers – between 2% and 3% of all
global consumption – a rate that is doubling every year."
The latest was IEA estimating it to be around 220-320 TWh (out of
30,000) in 2021 data and growing between 10-60% over 6 years in
total (so let's than 10 CAGR). But it's certainly not doubling
every year. That's just completely wrong.
DanielSchien
Senior Lecturer in Computer Science
Department of Computer Science | University of Bristol
*Submit software engineering project ideas for 2022*
http://bris.ac.uk/software-engineering
Watch: https://youtu.be/lU-ZsBDFWDI
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* E-impact <[email protected]> on behalf of Vint
Cerf <[email protected]>
*Sent:* Thursday, April 20, 2023 2:16:38 AM
*To:* [email protected] <[email protected]>
*Cc:* Michael Richardson <[email protected]>; starlink
<[email protected]>; [email protected]
<[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [E-impact] [Starlink] DataCenters in Space (was
Re: fiber IXPs in space)
O&M will be a bear
v
On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 9:13 PM Tom Evslin via Starlink
<[email protected]> wrote:
I think space-based data centers will be the rule rather than
the exception. Wrote about that a couple of years ago
although, as usual, things have not happened as quickly as I
predicted
https://blog.tomevslin.com/2021/07/computing-clouds-in-orbit-a-possible-roadmap.html
-----Original Message-----
From: Starlink <[email protected]> On
Behalf Of Michael Richardson via Starlink
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2023 7:35 PM
To: starlink <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: [Starlink] DataCenters in Space (was Re: fiber IXPs
in space)
I saw this reported in BIS-Spaceflight.
(I'm usually a few months behind in reading it) I like the
"first objective"!
https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwide/space/press-release/ascend-thales-alenia-space-lead-european-feasibility-study-data
Cannes, November 14, 2022 – Thales Alenia Space, the joint
company between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), has been
chosen by the European Commission to lead the ASCEND
(Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero emission and Data
sovereignty) feasibility study for data centers in orbit, as
part of Europe’s vast Horizon Europe research program.
Digital technology’s expanding environmental footprint is
becoming a major
challenge: the burgeoning need for digitalization means that
data centers in Europe and around the world are growing at an
exponential pace, which in turn has a critical energy and
environmental impact.
The first objective of this study will be to assess if the
carbon emissions from the production and launch of these
space infrastructures will be significantly lower than the
emissions generated by ground-based data centers, therefore
contributing to the achievement of global carbon neutrality.
The second objective will be to prove that it is possible to
develop the required launch solution and to ensure the
deployment and operability of these spaceborne data centers
using robotic assistance technologies currently being
developed in Europe, such as the EROSS IOD demonstrator.
This project is expected to demonstrate to which extent
space-based data centers would limit the energy and
environmental impact of their ground counterparts, thus
allowing major investments within the scope of Europe’s Green
Deal, possibly justifying the development of a more
climate-friendly, reusable heavy launch vehicle. Europe could
thus regain its leadership in space transport and space
logistics, as well as the assembly and operations of large
infrastructures in orbit.
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