[Server-sky] Communications - how much is enough?

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> I was talking Wednesday with Don Hoffman, who helped lead the
> Teledesic effort.  He was telling me that licensing a lot of sats
> would be problematic, and that we really needed high inclination
> orbits so we could talk to northerly customers (M288 can see about
> 60 degrees north theoretically, and practically probably 50 north).

That leaves out some of the more populated cities in Scandinavia.

> It occurred to me that the first arrays of server-sats will be in
> the computation business, not the communication business.  We
> really don't need high bandwidth global coverage in the beginning.
> While we do need high bandwidth upload/download to a few ground
> stations, we can do most of our computation business with low
> bandwidth communication.

What's the bandwidth going to be between the server-sats? How many
server-sats will be required to provide 10X the raw 64-bit floating
point horsepower of the fastest supercomputer (publicly described) on
Earth today?

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.