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by lugao 131 days ago
Maintaining modern accelerators requires frequent hands-on intervention -- replacing hardware, reseating chips, and checking cable integrity.

Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.

By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.
2 comments
trothamel 131 days ago
On the other hand, Tesla vehicles have similar hardware built into them, and don't require such hands-on intervention. (And that's the hardware that will be going up.)
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lugao 131 days ago
Car-grade inference hardware is fundamentally different from data center-grade inference hardware, let alone the specialized, interconnected hardware used for training (like NVLink or complex optical fabrics). These are different beasts in terms of power density, thermal stress, and signaling sensitivity.

Beyond that, we don't actually know the failure rate of the Tesla fleet. I’ve never had a personal computer fail from use in my life, but that’s just anecdotal and holds no weight against the law of large numbers. When you operate at the scale of a massive cluster, "one-in-a-million" failures become a daily statistical certainty.

Claiming that because you don't personally see cars failing on the side of the road means they require zero intervention actually proves my original point: people who haven't managed data center reliability underestimate the sheer volume of "rare" failures that occur at scale.

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trothamel 131 days ago
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017792776415682639

For what it's worth, this project plans to use Tesla AI5/AI6 hardware for the first launches.

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jonah 131 days ago
Not only the sibling comments points, but cars aren't exposed to the radiation of space...
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cloudfudge 130 days ago
Well, one car is... and it's a Tesla!
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boutell 130 days ago
Thank you. The waste heat problem is so bad but no one gets around to mentioning the fact that you can't have AI grade chips and space at the same time.
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