Putting AI in house could sound like a sci-fi nightmare, however Google is considering the thought with a analysis endeavor known as Project Suncatcher. The concept is to place power-hungry knowledge facilities into orbit on solar-powered satellites, to allow them to be powered by limitless, clear vitality obtainable 24 hours a day. That would mitigate the nastiest elements of AI cloud computing, like the usage of energy crops that spew enormous quantities of CO2 into the environment.
Project Suncatcher is a literal moonshot of the kind that Google used to do extra usually. The search large desires to place its AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), into orbit aboard photo voltaic panel-equipped satellites. “In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute,” wrote Google senior director Travis Beals. “In the fitting orbit, a photo voltaic panel might be as much as 8 instances extra productive than on Earth, and produce energy almost repeatedly, lowering the necessity for batteries.”
Suffice to say, the thought poses quite a few challenges. That proximity to the solar would expose the TPUs to excessive ranges of radiation that may quickly degrade digital elements. However, Google has examined its present chips for radiation tolerance and stated they’d be capable of survive a 5 12 months mission with out struggling everlasting failures.
Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (Google)
Another problem is the high-speed knowledge hyperlinks of “tens of terabits per second” and low latency required between satellites. Those speeds can be laborious to realize in house, as transmitting knowledge at lengthy distances requires exponentially extra energy than on Earth. To obtain that, Google stated it might have to maneuver TPU-equipped satellites into tight formations, probably inside “kilometers or much less” of one another. That would have the additional benefit of lowering “station protecting” thrust maneuvers wanted to maintain the satellites in the fitting place.
The figuring out issue, although, is cash. Launching TPUs into house could not appear cost-efficient, however Google’s evaluation reveals that doing so could possibly be “roughly comparable” to knowledge facilities on Earth (when it comes to energy effectivity) by across the mid-2030s.
While it is at present solely a preliminary analysis paper, Google is planning to place Project Suncatcher via some preliminary trials. It has teamed with an organization known as Planet on a “studying mission” to launch a pair of prototype satellites into orbit by 2027. “This experiment will take a look at how our fashions and TPU {hardware} function in house and validate the usage of optical inter-satellite hyperlinks for distributed ML [machine learning] duties,” Google wrote.
