New ask Hacker News story: Starlink Satellite Data Centers

Starlink Satellite Data Centers
3 by daly | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Suggestion: Consider building a "data center satellite", perhaps in synchronous orbit, that contains a continuous upload of the whole internet (a petabyte fits in a relatively small cube of silicon chips). Add a "local cache" capability to each low earth satellite that holds recently accessed pages. Pages can be marked with Time-to-live before needing a refresh so relatively static pages (like youtube) can be kept and only highly active pages (e.g. news) can be swapped (and cached based on least-recently-used). This is essentially a CDN (e.g. an Akamai-like service). The result is a much lower lag time, lower round-trips to Earth, and less need for Earth stations. Plus, in the future, they could put such "satellite data centers" in orbit around Mars, thus minimizing Mars internet access times for the Mars human data settlements.

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