A big primitive computer in orbit, very big, powerfull but old technologies from 80's, what is a potential fiat money value for its use?

Question

This question about the economy of technological solution, there 800 of such on wb

Was looking for materials for the answer to the question

Semiconductor foundries are a thing of the past. Rebuild the computer industry if you can

it turns out that it is seemingly possible to obtain a full stack of technologies for the chips from the 75-80's for a moderate amount of money. So Mr.X from the q decides that his shady moon deals may hit a golden opportunity and using that knowledge how to restore production, he may produce many many pieces of equipment for the production of many many processors like Motorola 68000 (specs: 8MHz, 1.5 Watt, 16/32bit, 16MB address space)

Sure it also needs RAM, SSD's, surface mounted components, and other dongles so as additional R&D to fit the purpose - resulting in a unit with a 20W power consumption total.

Just vaguely multiplying numbers, to be able to get to some modern metric, to make a comparison performance of that unit is around 100'000 FLOPS, which is somewhat 1/1000'000 of a modern CPU performance.

• really one can appreciate how much things have changed in 50 years, a minute of appreciation here

So a grand plan is

A many many production nodes on the moon produce and launch many many calculating nodes in space, Lagrange points, or as a ring around the planet.

• Best kerbals work on orbital and launch mechanics, so there is absolutely no problems here, nothing, I repeat, nothing can go wrong - it all stable and sound, orbiting and being where all that should be.

The ring size is 40'000km in diameter, and a big hole in it of a diameter of 20'000km for the light to the planet to go through, placed in a Lagrange point with 10-second delay.

Data goes in and out thanks to his buddy Elon Tusk's satellite network.

System performance is around 1'922'654 PetaFLOPs, strong and steady, (which translates to 19e15 calculating nodes).

Clearly, it is not your general computer, but it is relatively good at crunching numbers in parallel fashion, somewhat similar like GPU's do their things, so rendering CGI videos may be possible if one writes proper software and SDK's

It is not enough to overtake, you know which, cryptocurrency system, which does 40 times more calculations

• it really should make you appreciate changes with chips production, as few times K1 energy is not enough, by far, to overdo what we do on a fraction of our computation power on modern hardware.

But the system easily trashes top 100 super computers from TOP500 list, combined - 1660 PetaFLOPs.

So on one side, it is not superior computing power, but it is not on the low side as well and can be put to some good use.

The question is:

Assuming the hardware is in the place where it should be, the software is running, joules are consumed - what kinds of gains/profits we may expect to have?

Not sure which metric can be used to evaluate the potential of rewards, but is it that golden opportunity Mr.X expects it to be, or is it a bust?

Will Mr.X be able to pay his buddy Mr. Elon Tusk, launching rockets to the Moon or it won't suffice even feed that Mr.X alone?

What kind of monetary value such system may have?

or if we spin it differently, as it seems to be correlated numbers:

How much money Mr.X earns, or what is his potential net worth?

• it is not important which metric do you use for evaluation, as long as it is mentioned. An answer is a number in a currency of your choice.

Mr.X does not plan to sell it as a whole but may consider some IPO, and sure collect money for entities who are interested to crunch some numbers, work with big data, train neural networks, etc. So what are reasonable expectations in the case?

Context where it all happens

• The world rules and setting etc - @JBH

Your planet, present-day, present economy, present prices, present rules, etc.

Results of asking it on comp related se

Nil, nothing, zero, null

Answer 1

Short answer: no.

This is based on two things, one apparent from this question and the other inferred from your previous, linked question.

The total processing power of your cloud of computers is pretty good, but the individual power of a given node is pretty gosh darn low by the standards of the last 30 years. Moreover, the nodes are out in space with a small but non-trivial round-trip time limited part by lightspeed, partially by bandwidth limitations induced by your lack of fancy high performance signal processing wizardry and partially by the sheer amount of hassle of distributing work between your hojillion compute nodes, orchestrating the tasks and collating the results.

What this means, then, is that your system is of most use for problems which can be broken down into a stupendous number of relatively simple operations. Individual operations must not form critical parts of the processing pipeline, because being in space means that cosmic radiation is going to scramble all the things in unpredictable ways, either meaning you have to be prepared to have dubious results in your dataset or to dedicate yet more processing power to verifying quality of results and rescheduling work. Between that and the communication delays, you have to be prepared for your work to take quite a while to complete.

What you end up with is something that looks a little bit like old-school batch-mode mainframes of the sort that might be owned and operated by government labs, universities and well-off commercial operations, and not anything that looks like the bulk of stuff that is run "in the cloud" nowadays. Your supercomputer is a very specialist bit of kit.

Now, from your previous question:

The military of each country took matters into its own hands, producing chips in secret, hardened underground bunkers

Clearly, military operations requiring supercomputers will not be requiring your services. Similarly, no big non-military batch-mode tasks run by governments and considered even the slightest bit sensitive will be put in your hands. Whether or not universities would use government computers is a bit of an open question, but if they do any kind of sensitive research (and you can assume that the biggest and richest and most famous universities do) then they might be required to use government approved computers for that, too.

What you're left with, then, are commercial organisations who need a lot of compute but don't do anything that's super sensitive by the standards of their local government, and small universities who aren't important enough to do sensitive work.

The latter can't afford to pay much for your services. The same will be true for many small commercial outfits and amateurs. You're left with a relatively small core of big-spending corporations who need to do a lot of fancy simulation work.

And they'll be asking why they need to use your slightly flaky deep space computer with huge round trip times instead of something hosted a bit closer to home.

How much money Mr.X earns, or what is his potential net worth?

Does he have a monopoly on compute power?

Then he'll have the petrochemical and aerospace industries on a short leash.

If there are alternatives, no-one will be that interested in his offering, or will at least have plenty of room to negotiate fees. He might get rich, but he won't be Bezos rich.

Answer 2

The market rate for computing power can be found e.g. here (linking to AWS is simply an example and not intended as an endorsement of any specific cloud vendor). Having it in orbit will probably affect the prices, but how?

• Legitimate customers might be worried about the lack of a jurisdiction. They might not even be able to use it.
• Criminal customers might see it exactly the other way around.

So the business model is bulletproof hosting on a large scale? Until downlink sites are pressured to cut the net connection. Unless the country where the original launch took place claims jurisdiction and you have only the drawbacks of being in space ...

Answer 3

Sell Computer Power

As with any other computer cluster, I don't particularly care where the computer is situated as long as access is good and fast enough. You can just sell processing capacity just like most other super computers.

For monetary comparison Amazon cloud computing comes to mind (maybe they are already running the network on satellites, I have no way of knowing.) Finding prices for super computers is a bit harder but should be easy enough to find.

Ball Park Revenue Figure

Because of the question I will give a ballpark figure of what might be expected in revenue. I calculate revenue because profit is something completely different and all depends on your company. In real life it will be probably orders of magnitude off since no effect of increase of supply of computer power, laws and regulations and services have been taken into account

So the cloud computing of Amazone (AWS) is 240 teraflops on average. There revenue of 2020 was 45B dollar ($45x10^9, presuming the American number system). So since you have 8 million the computer power you would expect a revenue of 8 millions times that. Which would give you a revenue of 0.36x10^21 of which is roughly almost a third sextillion. For your information we have roughly 37 trillion dollars of money circulating in the economy.

So seeing that you would create a complete monopoly and a huge increase in supply you can't estimate the revenue based on any current worldly situation.

Note: See remark by Rob Watts for an error in the numbers.