Scientists have thought about placing large data centers in…
Scientists from the Russian MSTU Bauman made a proposal to place large data centers, as well as various kinds of supercomputers in outer space, which will significantly reduce the cost of electricity to ensure their operation. In addition, this solution will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions on Earth.
Presumably, we are talking about promising quantum supercomputers operating in an ultra-low temperature environment, and such complexes in orbit include solar panels, power supply and heat removal systems, as well as the equipment itself that processes large amounts of information and telecom equipment designed for high-speed exchange data between the complex itself and ground stations.
In addition, several of these complexes will be able to exchange information with each other, forming a kind of "space cloud". At the same time, the Lagrange point L1 is called the desirable place for their placement, in which the Earth does not block the Sun and the onboard solar batteries can function without interruption.
At the current time, the authors of the project are preparing its justification, both technical and economic, and work is underway on the business planning of the program. The key problem of the proposed solution may be the high cost of delivering the complexes into orbit, which will negate all the benefits of using the energy generated by solar panels in work.
The commercialization of space requires more than launch capabilities and satellite communications. Modern satellites are not designed to process huge amounts of space data. An in-orbit data infrastructure is needed to drive the growth and commercialization of space. The main mission of these technologies is to provide the missing piece - a virtualized data infrastructure in orbit at the edge of space that is flexible and adaptable to new requirements, turning data into useful information.
In the last decade, especially in the last few years, low-cost reusable rocket technology has completely destroyed the plans for space industrialization. Launching satellites into space is getting cheaper and easier every day. For cloud computing on Earth, the initial challenges were processing power and data security. With the development of the Cloud, these problems have been solved. Now latency and throughput are the most common problems. The orbital data bottleneck has similar patterns: processing power, memory size, bandwidth, and latency are the most severe. While low Earth orbit provides the best satellite-to-Earth delay scenario due to its proximity, there is also a future for data growth itself.
