A big primitive computer in orbit, very big, powerful but old technologies from 80's, V2.0 on-topic revamp

Question

• I have to point out, it is an attempt to make this on-topic, all thanks to @JBH, so tell us in the comments how well we did. the old one is history now.

50 years ago my grandfather created humanity's most impressive computer

When grandpa dreamed, he dreamed big! he took the best tech of his day, from early solid-state hard drives to the latest derivative of the Motorola 68000 CPU, from the most amazing radioisotope thermoelectric generators to solar panels just like those on Skylab! Look, I'm not going to bore you with the details about how this thing was built — that's really not at all important to my question — but I will explain one more thing that is.

It's HUGE!

OK, two things...

It's IN SPACE!

Specifically, my grandfather's big honking supercomputer is floating out there, right now, 2021, in a Lagrange point. I can Telnet to it, I can play games on it... But here's my problem: what do I do with it?

You see, I have a few gambling debts...

Who knows what grandpa did with the thing, but it's up there, running just fine, and when he passed away he left it to me. Now I need this thing to start generating some cash! Don't worry why, that's not really important either... but what is important is this: its computational prowess is something on the order of 1.9 zettaFLOPS. I'll let you work that out in your head for a moment. (This easily blows away most of the top 500 computing systems in 2021 combined.)

But it's worth remembering, 50 year old tech! That means the machine works through massive parallelization. I really meant it when I said the individual processors are like Motorola 68000s. I know the OS will have some impact on your answers, so please believe me that it's a somewhat souped-up version of SunOS 1. Yeah, 1980s... where do you think they got their ideas? Hah! Grandpa! I'm kinda hoping that your answers won't depend on the OS, just so you know.

Now, if you really want to know the details, I'll tell you, but honestly, it's completely unimportant. How that monster got up there, what satellite network we use to connect to it, what operating system it uses, how it manages its power and maintains itself... it's all unimportant. The only thing you need to know at this point is that I'm clueless about how to generate some cash with this thing. I'm not at all interested in selling it (I'm sentimental!). I want to put it to some use!

So here's the question, folks...

I know this is a bit vague, but frankly, I think the sheer scope of this thing limits its potential uses and it's not like there's an infinite number of business models. So...

What business model can I apply to start generating some cash?

1. Remember, I'm not going to sell it.
2. Ignore costs of operation. Yes, they're sizeable, but if you're going to suggest something low-brow like online gambling... honestly, 1.9 zettaFLOPS... you didn't look up that number if you think something like that is an effective use of this machine.
3. You can believe that I have the resources to ensure international-grade encryption (don't ask how we did it with SunOS 1 — it's a family secret!), so don't worry about how data is moved, how fast it's moved, or how secure that transmission is. This question is all about the computer.
4. Look around, it's 2021 and it doesn't matter where you're living in the world. If you just learned about grandpa's legacy, then you haven't been reading newspapers for the last 50 years! What I have is a resource and I need your help figuring out how to put that resource to work. But remember... you need to use the resource the way it was intended, as a computer. No suggestions about blackmailing countries or I drop the thing on their capital. If it helps, assume I can't or won't move it and I certainly won't damage or destroy it! Look, I'll entertain, shall we say... shady... business models, but I'm no terrorist!
5. If you're really caught up in how that thing got there or can do what it does... assume aliens helped grandpa do it. It won't bother me and it's as good an excuse as any.
6. Finally, if you have any hope of being selected as my business partner, you'll explain why the business model you pitch is better than any other.

Some technicality

Connection to the thing is quite modern, even if on the side of the system it is just old fashion solar panels accepting laser beams, at multiple points with let's say 64kbit per receiver with a total capacity 100Gbit, and retrofit 100Gbit downlink. Good catch from @Alexander.

So yes, it not for big data be shuffled up and down, if we take just ram 16MB per each node thrn it takes 770 thousand years to upload download ram snapshot from all the nodes using that 100 Gbit link.

So mode of operation sending relatively small data - GB's, TB's, PB's sizes, expand it with calculations filter out those which aren't useful collect useful data which fits the bandwidth.

quite big limitation actually, which has to be accounted for. Which creates a significant difference to that another question.

Location seems to be important piece of information as well, thanks to @notovny and @Goodies

Location is lagrange point L1 of Sun-Earth, so it is the sunny side, it is how the thing gets its energy from and what makes flashing with leds for advertisement to be pointless, besides that it is 1.5 million km's away.

Answer 1

Save the world, getting a substantial income from every nation on Earth.

Assuming a generous 0.12 floating point operations per instruction cycle (generous, as the 68000 needed a math co-processor to efficiently perform) and a needed 1.9 Zeta FLOPS then a distributed total of 1.58*10^22 instruction cycles per second are required. According to Ray Kurzweil et al., in 1971 approximately 6 watts were needed per Mega instruction cycle:

^{Open access Wikipedia 2021}

Which would indicate that a 6*1.58*10^16 watt or 94.8 Peta Watt power supply was up there in space ready for use.

The world's current energy usage is about 15 terawatts continuous, so this is substantially more than would be required to supply the world's energy needs for the foreseeable future and clean-up the planet in the process.

Your father was a misguided visionary, and you are a true hero. Now the tricky bit, getting the power down to the people without accidentally roasting them (I leave to the writer) but it should be worth 20 Billion Dollars at current prices. Presumably, interplanetary propulsion by laser would be at your disposal too, so the true space-race begins. Elon Musk weeps into his Dom Perignon.

As to the computer hardware, you have the first orbiting "Museum of Curiosity".

Answer 2

Hugely parallel architecture? No concerns around encryption or connectivity? All maintenance done by magic at zero cost??!?

Start mining!!

Specifically: Cryptocurrency mining.

Cryptocurrencies are built on the back of complex maths. Every Bitcoin or Etherium nugget or insert own trendy name here requires that a shedload of computational work be done to prove it is it’s own unique thing and that it can be used as the basis of a shared, trust free ledger (blockchain or some other proprietary algorithm. The need for work is much the same). The more successful (valuable) a currency is the harder it is to do the work, and the more computational power you need to do it.

Good news is it can mostly be done in a distributed fashion. Get a good GPU (hardware built to do the same thing a billion times in parallel) and you can mine cryptocurrency, turning power into value that you own! Then you sell that cryptocurrency for government backed currency and you’re on your way.

But there’s a catch.

You might have noticed that at the moment high end GPUs are very expensive. This isn’t because they’ve gotten harder to make: it’s because they’re being bought by cryptocurrency miners. Why?

Because GPUs burn out. They get old. They overheat. They break. This is a major source of cost for a mining operation, along with the obvious costs for power, cooling and space to store the racks of components.

But your grandpa solved that with Space Magic. So you (using your family secrets) can mine cryptocurrency for free, with no overheads. Then sell it. Choose whichever cryptocurrency is riding high at the moment and go to town.

And pray you don’t crash the market with a poorly thought out tweet...

Answer 3

Sell computational power

While I agree with Joe Bloggs that the best use (at least at the moment) for this computer is crypto-mining, a secundary possibility is to lend your huge computational power to companies

A hugely parallel architecture seems very well suited to solve problems in modeling complex systems (using the finite element method).
I think a lot of pharmaceutic, automotive and aeronautic companies (without even mentioning dinosaur-cloning bilionaires) will be very happy to buy computational power from you in order run the most complicated simulations.

Probably also mathematicians will be happy to have access to your architecture (see this question on math stackexchange about problems that can't be solved at the moment because of lack of computational power)

Answer 4

Make it shine

These 80s Super computers were indeed very big and they had huge led panels ! Find a sponsor, upload a program to show his logo on the led panel, flashing through the skies world wide..

Answer 5

Contract with the NSA to brute force break encryption keys. That project would have low communications load but huge parallel processing load.

There would be two advantages for this. The NSA has an unlimited budget for projects like this. And they would be able to offer "protection" against those who are coming after you for the gambling debts.

Answer 6

Recycle the hardware for the gold in it.

When you have 50 year old technology in a hard radiation environment, most of it won't work. The Hubble Space Telescope electronics are failing after 30 years and some have already been replaced with newer. My Mac Plus (68000) from 1986 will turn on, the floppy disk still spins, but other parts don't work anymore. Over 50 years, metals start migrating and internal chip connections fail because of metal migration. Long term space spec. memory of that day is iron core which is vulnerable to "flipped bits" (see https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/4647/core-memory-stability)

I really doubt that you have any computational power left. And if you did, trying to find which processors still worked, what memory cells still would hold values, which local disks still spun at the correct velocity, and what cables still worked would be a huge challenge that only someone in slavery might undertake. You would be needing to physically restructure the system - perhaps daily. Look at how data centers of today swap out equipment after a very short operational life (such as 18 months) - because the failure rates start adding up.

The most value that you have there is in the precious metals and space spec. hardware will have more than usual (and stuff made back then used more than today).

(If you have the technology to physically visit this system and return, you could use that technology to visit the moon and bring back both samples and souvenirs from the Apollo missions. Now, there is a way to make some serious money. Moon rocks and souvenirs from the Apollo missions where you can prove that it was on the moon bring huge bucks.)

Answer 7

Hold other satellites hostage

As per Rogue Ant's answer, this computer can generate a few orders of magnitude more power than our current civilization uses. That much power, if used at once, would vaporize the satellite. If it runs for one second at max overclock, the total power spent is ~2.61 $\times$ 10¹³ Wh (26.1 TWh). According to what is probably the most quoted table in this site, that is about half the yield of the original Tsar Bomba.

The satellite would become a shower of particles that, hours later, might mess up a few satellites - maybe the ISS as well. That would be too expensive for the world to risk. So you can charge the world leaders the sum of one million dollars in order to not do that.