this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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12 of 2800 planned have been launched.
I have a server at home built from old parts and some refurbished drives with nearly as much storage as the currently launched satellites. 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.
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?
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, 2800 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.