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tech_ken | 26 days ago
Your link here isn't really a fair comparison, and also you're still short a factor of 10x. Starlink has deployed 50x the ISS's solar cap across its entire fleet (admittedly 3 years ago); the author's calcs are 500x the ISS for one datacenter.
> and obviously the heat dissipation problem for those satellites has already been solved so there's little point in hand-wringing about that.
This reasoning doesn't make any sense to me, the heat dissipation issues seem very much unresolved. A single Starlink satellite is using power in the order of watts, a datacenter is hitting like O(1/10) of gigawatts. The heat dissipation problem is literally orders of magnitude more difficult for each DC than for their current fleet. This is like saying that your gaming PC will never overheat because NetGear already solved heat dissipation in their routers.
> The author also worries about ground communication bandwidth, claiming it is "difficult to get much more than about 1Gbps reliably", which seems completely ignorant of the fact that Starlink already has a capacity much greater than that.
Don't their current satellites have like 100Gbps capacity max? Do you have any idea how many 100Gbps routers go into connecting a single datacenter to the WAN? Or to each other (since intrahall model training is table stakes these days). They have at most like O(1)Pbps across their entire fleet (based on O(10K) satellites deployed and assuming they have no failover protection). They would need to entirely abandon their consumer base and use their entire fleet to support up/down + interconnections for just 2 or 3 datacenters. They would basically need to redeploy a sizeable chunk of their entire fleet every time they launched a DC.
Ajedi32|26 days ago
So 3 years ago they managed to get to 10% of the power budget of one data center by accident, using satellites not explicitly designed for that purpose, using a partially reusable launch platform with 1/10th the payload capacity of Starship. My point is they've already demonstrated they can do this at the scale that's needed.
> A single Starlink satellite is using power in the order of watts
Then why does each satellite have a 6 kW solar array? Re-read that post I linked; the analysis is pretty thorough.
> Don't their current satellites have like 100Gbps capacity max?
Gen 3 is reportedly up to 1 Tbps ground link capacity, for one satellite.[1] There will be thousands.
> Do you have any idea how many 100Gbps routers go into connecting a single datacenter to the WAN? Or to each other (since intrahall model training is table stakes these days).
Intra-satellite connections use the laser links and would not consume any ground link capacity.
You're also ignoring that this is explicitly being pitched as a solution for compute-heavy workloads (AI training and inference) not bandwidth-heavy workloads.
[1]: https://starlink.com/updates/network-update
tech_ken|26 days ago
How was it by accident? You make it sound like it was easy rather than a total revolution of the space industry? To achieve 1/10th of what they would need for a single DC (and most industry leaders have 5 or 6)? Demonstrating they could generate power at DC scale would be actually standing up a gigawatt of orbital power generation, IMO. And again, this is across thousands of units. They either have to build this capacity all in for a single DC, or somehow consolidate the power from thousands of satellites.
> Then why does each satellite have a 6 kW solar array? Re-read that post I linked; the analysis is pretty thorough.
You're right, my bad. So they're only short like 6 orders of magnitude instead of 9? Still seems massively disingenuous to conclude that they've solved the heat transfer issue.
> Gen 3 is reportedly up to 1 Tbps ground link capacity, for one satellite.[1] There will be thousands.
Okay I'll concede this one, they could probably get the data up and down. What's the latency like?