[michaelnoguera]

This makes me imagine a space station like data center in orbit that acts like a public cloud on earth, communicating directly with satellites and renting out processing time. I'm not sure how well economies of scale work when you have to pay for every kg you send up there, but it would be an interesting business model.

[geysersam]

Is is cheaper for a satelite to transfer data to a space based datacenter than to a ground based one? If not, what's the benefit of locating the data center in orbit? (Except, of course, that it's awesome.)

[jvanderbot]

Stop imagining, in 2021 a cluster of computers were sent up to test this, and since then several instruments are in the works to make use of similar (but not same) CPU clusters.

As always, finding a system that is affordable and radiation tolerant is the problem.

[anonymousDan]

Do you have a link to this?

[jvanderbot]

Here is one paper by the group working on this.

Full disclaimer I had some code of mine and a paper that I'm not linking.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9884906