[PLUG] ANNOUNCEMENT: PLUG Advanced Topics April 15th 2009

[Alan]

Advanced Topics
April 15th, 2009 7pm - 9pm-ish

Location:   Roots Organic Brewery
            1520 SE 7TH
            Portland, Oregon

Topic:      Server Sky - Data Centers in Orbit
Speaker:    Keith Lofstrom

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