Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot!
Jensen is heading to space, or at least his Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules plan to hit orbit some time in the near future. We got a lot of information about the terrestrial Vera Rubin designs, incorporating Rubin GPUs with Vera CPUs into rack-scale systems linked via a massive NVLink copper spine. We did not get a lot of specific details of the Space-1 version of the design apart from the focus on size-, weight- and power-constrained environments.
That is very important, as players of sims like Kerbal or Terra Invicta are well aware; rocket science isn’t easy. The weight of the payload in a launcher directly increases the costs of the launch and cooling things in space is non-trivial. While space is cold in general it is also an insulator, there is nothing there to absorb heat effectively. As well, the temperature in near Earth orbit can vary by as much as 360C thanks to the Sun’s radiation. LEO objects go from around 120C to -240C depending on if they are in direct sunlight or not and that creates a huge heat problem.
The design of LEO objects have always had to deal with that problem and usually do so by making due with extremely low powered electronics, at least as compared to what we are used to hear at the bottom of the gravity well. To build a data centre with enough processing power to justify the costs of launching it into orbit will push our current heat management systems to their limits, or beyond. That doesn’t even begin to account for the shielding you would need to prevent bits randomly flipping because of the impact of cosmic rays. That is only a slight concern here on Earth but will definitely be an issue in orbit.
We can certainly hope Space-1 has better security than most satellites, and it will be interesting to see if the sysadmins need to be Rastafarian.
