Italy's military mulling space-based supercomputing cloud Italy's Ministry of Defense is exploring a "military space cloud" and has commissioned state-backed aerospace contractor Leonardo to test the concept. The Military Space Cloud Architecture project "intends to define a space-based architecture capable of providing government and national armed forces with high-performance …
The solar power itself is free, but there is the cost of lifting all those solar panels into space. That's before even considering the processing, memory, comms and additional cooling which all have to be space-hardened (so costing much more than datacenter-grade kit), and all of which also needs to be lifted to space. There might be a bunch of reasons to want a datacenter in space, but "lower cost" ain't one of them!!
Sounds good. That way, they can abolish their navy, and save loads of money. Just have two squaddies water skiing behind a shark.
As we traditionally arm sharks with laser beams, can we also arm elephants with chainsaws? That allows Italy to save a fortune in tanks as well.
Then you just need some giraffes to carry the radars. Only problem is how to balance them on the sharks...
Can giraffes swim?
No problem, with the D5-P5336, an SSD that will be able to hold 61TB a pop, you can bring 4 of them in a RAID 5 config and you should have enough for storage.
Of course, the damage one single cosmic ray is going to do to that array is probably going to be epic, not to mention all that effort will likely be trashed when Putin decides to nuke Earth's lower orbit, but hey, it's the military, right ? What could possibly go wrong ?
I mean I can perfectly understand how Italy is so mind-boggingly large that it needs storage in space for its military to be able to easily communicate over those vast distances that lay between the pub and the opera.
Such a successfully achieved development would/could be reflective and prime indicative of a Holy Vatican type See which certainly would be creative of world dominating ventures with AI accommodations employed and deployed demonstrating miraculous powers and extra-terrestrial heavenly energies .....with almighty surges purging diabolical synergies.
That very obviously would result in multiple covetous oppositions and universal and unilateral competition. Let the Greater IntelAIgent Games begin ....
And in the beginning whenever AI says “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” is a satisfactory starting point and ultimate destination guaranteed delivered for perpetual enjoyment and employment with an infinite variety and countless iterations of an Immaculate Understanding for futures presenting and nurturing highly evolved and naturally disruptive revolutionary beings ..... and then what say thee in SMARTR* reply to such as can also oft be mistaken for cyber-mercenaries and Private Sector Offensive Actors (PSOAs)?
Be adventurous and radical now, for conventional and traditional aint gonna cut it and result in anything like the above is busy supplying sublimely ..... so as not to overly and overtly petrify and terrify the natives.
* .... SMARTR Mentoring Analysis Reporting Titanic Research
I'm pretty sure that can be done, the specs are low enough to be mobile - but I don't get the point _why_ one should attempt it.
A radiation-rich, unservicable environment is still hard to design for, so having comms equipment in space and computing/storage on the ground is the established norm.
What is the actual benefit of also moving compute and storage into space?
EricM,
The military uses lots of computers. Modern radars and sonars achieve a lot of their effectiveness by using massive amounts of computer processing to remove clutter and false returns. The smaller the radar cross-section of what you're trying to detect (stealth aircraft / small missiles / drones), the more computing power you're going to need.
The other problem is sensor fusion. In the old days you looked at your radar, and you talked to people on the radio, and then you built up your picture of the battle. Then you got datalinks so you could share your battle picture with other people - but one would always be generating the "master" picture, that everyone else was adding thier intel to.
Increasingly though, militaries want to merge the data from their sensors all over the place. Radars on ships and aircraft, but also images from drones, data from troops on the ground and satellite intel. If you can merge the raw radar data from two radars a long way apart, then maybe you can get even more sensitivity, like the large arrays used in radio-astronomy. But this is getting really data intensive and requires lots of processing. So maybe it makes sense that everyone could send their raw data to a single satellite, and the processing be done there? If you're dealing with a ship, then computers and power aren't a problem. But aircraft are limited in both, and ground troops even more so.
Whether it's a good idea or not, don't ask me. Last year the RAF shot down a test drone with an air-to-air missile from a Typhoon, but using the radar off a Navy type 45 destroyer. And this is supposedly the secret sauce of the F35. That F35 have an even better datalink, so they can build incredibly good situational awareness from the assets around them, and then act as commanders for groups of other aircraft to make the whole team more effective. Or alternatively, your F35 can sneak somewhere with its active sensors turned off (to stay stealthy), while using the radar data from other assets to prosecute targets nearer to it, without revealing its position until it opens fire.
Maybe they know something we don't, like the Earth becomes toxic soon, or maybe to let everyone think they've put compute in orbit when they've put it in the med, otherwise it's a completely stupid, bonkers idea. And why is a military (ok, it's the Italian military) publically announcing where it's thinking of sticking its command and control capability?
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