Now We've Had Doom In Space, It Seems That Data Centers And Even...
Because nothing shouts cost-effectiveness better than doing something in space.
Last year, the European Space Agency and a game developer got a little satellite, orbiting Earth in space, to run Doom in real-time. The lure of doing something perfectly normal on terra firma in the utterly hostile environment of space is just the preserve of a handful of coders, though, as two companies are hoping to be the first to have a data center and, believe it or not, a chip foundry in orbit.
This might seem like a colossally expensive thing to do, but when one of the aforementioned companies just happens to be Google, you know that the upfront cost probably isn't an issue. With the name Project Suncatcher, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Google is hoping to design a special solar panel system to power all of its data centers.
Well, that's partially correct, but Project Suncatcher aims to use the power of the Sun by getting just a teeny bit closer to it, by putting the data centers in space. This isn't some whimsical fantasy; Google has seriously thought about all of this, as detailed in its research paper (PDF warning) on the project.
The reason behind it all is that if you have satellites in a synchronous low Earth orbit, they're exposed almost continuously to sunlight. So with sufficiently big solar panels, you'll never need to worry about powering the data centre. Normally, such systems are huge in size—bigger than the International Space Station—but Google plans to use a host of satellites instead, similar to how SpaceX manages its Starlink internet service.
Google's even tested its AI processors for the impact of radiation, and apparently, they hold up pretty well, or at the very least, long enough for the required five-year lifespan of each satellite. In fact, the only thing that's stopping the tech giant from flinging data centers off into space right now is launch costs.
However, it estimates that these could fall low enough within the next 10 years, and if it hits $200 per kg, then "the cost of launching and operating a space-based data center could become roughly comparable to the reported energy costs of an equivalent terrestrial data center on a per-kilowatt/year basis."
Now, while all that does seem quite viable, I'm considerably less convinced by what US chip maker Besxar wants to do. Put simply, instead of spending billions making enormous semiconductor foundries on Earth, it wants to have them in space instead.
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Source: PC Gamer
