Comment on China begins assembling its supercomputer in space
GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca 2 days ago12 of 2800 planned have been launched.
That’s still not very much compared to most data centers. Like, 7000 terabytes is a lot of storage for one person, but it barely even registers compared to most modern data centers.
Also, 7000 desktops networked together isn’t really a super computer or a data center.
such a network is interesting as a scientific tool for gathering and processing data, certainly, but not a data-center and not a super computer.
But being accurate with the headline makes it less click baity. 😏 Honestly, this article is scant on details.
Data centers don’t usually have an “X-ray polarization detector for picking up brief cosmic phenomena.” Like you said, it seems more like a scientific tool than an actual “data center.”
Imagine the latency on a data center in space. Uplink/downlink every time your server gets an inferencing request? Lol.
I could see it being fine for longer running asynchronous requests, but that would be if the cost/benefit made any sense at all, and if the servers had any resources worth talking about.
TehPers@beehaw.org 1 day ago
I have a server at home built from old parts and some refurbished drives with nearly that much storage. 2800 satellites like this would come out to around 230 of my servers, or ~7PB.
A single 2U server with 12 drives, each with 24TB storage, can hold 288TB. It would take ~24 of those to get to 7PB, which is a lot of servers, but not so many that someone with quite a lot of savings couldn’t afford it.
Also, the servers on the ground can be cooled by, idk, air if needed. Or water. Or I guess liquid nitrogen if you want. Point is there’s an atmosphere for the heat to dissipate to, unlike space.
GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
They’ve certainly had to come up with some way to effectively radiate the heat into space. The article doesn’t mention it though. i presume it’s one of the main reasons for networking so many machines together?