PLUG Advanced Topics Meeting Wednesday April 15th, 2009 7pm As you may or may not heard, we have lost our old location at Jax Bar for the Advanced Topics meetings.
The New Location is at: Roots Organic Brewery 1520 SE 7th Ave Portland, OR 97214 Speaker: Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com> Subject: Server Sky - Internet and Computing in Orbit Large data may soon consume 50MW or more of electrical energy. The EPA estimated US data center power consumption in 2006 at 60 billion kilowatt hours, or 1.5% of total US power consumption, and predicts a doubling by 2011. This will have huge environmental, social, and economic consequences unless we find alternative ways to power our digital economy. Server sky is a proposal to build large dispersed arrays of ultralight solar powered server satellites and launch them into 6400km equatorial earth orbits, between the inner and outer Van Allen belts. There is room in these orbits for billions of server-sats. A 30 gram server-sat consists of a thinned 12 inch solar cell, with power efficient processors, solid state memory, and microwave transceivers bonded to the edges. Thousands of server-sats position themselves into dozens of dispersed three dimensional arrays (hundreds of meters on a side) using light pressure for thrust and liquid-crystal shutters for trimtab steering. A server-sat array acts as a large phased array antenna, permitting it to steer thousands of communication beams at receiving stations and communities under its position in orbit, handing off communication and control to the server-sat arrays that follow it in orbit. Earth can return to what it is good at – green and growing things – while space can be filled with gray and computing things. More information at http://www.server-sky.com note: This is my first practice session of the talk I am preparing for LinuxFest on April 25th. Some slides aren't finished yet, so PLUG attendees can help me generate some. Tools: Openoffice, gnuplot, libgd (C, C++, and Perl), PNG and animated GIF graphics. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG-announce mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
