Modern data centers consume a lot of power, require very complex cooling, and are physically vulnerable to natural disasters and military conflicts. How about building a data center on the Moon?
Well, this startup has a radical way to solve data center power and cooling problems by placing it on the Moon. The project has already prepared two ordered space flights to place the various equipment needed on the Moon. The ultimate goal is to have a network of servers on the Moon powered by nuclear reactors.
Lonestar Data Holdings is planning to build a data center network on the Moon. The company has contracted Intuitive Machines for its first two missions to the lunar surface. The actual RISC-V based engine will be made by a company called Skycorp.
"Data is the biggest currency created by mankind," said Chris Stott, founder of Lonestar as quoted from World of Buzz.
"We depend on it for almost everything we do and it is too important for us as a species to be kept in Earth's increasingly fragile biosphere. The largest satellite on Earth, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future," he said.
There are many challenges with installing a data center on the surface of the Moon. Of course, the costs associated with sending servers to the Moon are one of them, but powering the servers and connecting them to the internet are the other two challenges.
To connect these machines to the internet, Lonestar will use a turnkey solution from Intuitive Machines, but for its long-term plans, Lonestar has made the required spectrum submissions for its mission with ITU.
One thing to keep in mind about using radio to connect servers on the Moon is that it takes about 2.7 seconds for radio waves to reach the Moon's surface and back, which is probably too long for the quality of service we're used to today.
One of the really interesting things about Lonestar's experimental data center is that it plans to deploy Skycorp servers based on the RISC-V open source instruction set (ISA) architecture.
"Skycorp is pleased to be able to provide our advanced multi-core RISC-V in space server architecture to the forward-thinking team at Lonestar," said Dennis Wingo, CEO and Founder of Skycorp.
"Our system is currently operating as the world's first web server on the International Space Station, and we look forward to supporting Lonestar in their innovative Lunar application next year."
Although there are no fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters on the Moon, this natural satellite of Earth has another big problem: the Moon's surface is constantly being bombarded by meteorites, because the Moon has no atmosphere and they don't burn. In addition, some estimates say that about 1.4 tons of meteorites fall to the surface of the Moon every day.
So installing a server at ground level that is constantly being bombarded is a risk, and so far it's unknown how Lonestar plans to minimize it.