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- Project Suncatcher is Google's moonshot effort to scale AI data centers in space utilizing the free solar power available. (bright gentle music) One of the very important questions we ask is whether this AI hardware and the system can survive in space. (spacecraft whirs) - It's a 10-minute ride on a rocket to low Earth orbit. And during that, the spacecraft is gonna be exposed to tremendous vibration forces, as well as sustained acceleration loads up to 10 times the force of gravity.
Individual components such as the AI chips can actually experience up to 50 to 100 g's of amplified forces. So really, the importance of vibration testing is to ensure that the custom packaging that Planet has designed to prevent this hardware from breaking is sufficient. The main piece of equipment we need is a vibration table that can be programmed with the frequencies that will mimic the rocket launch. So we'll build our first prototype of a package and then put it on a vibe table and we will shake it in all three axes. These early prototype or kind of moonshot vibe tests, they rarely go as you expect them to, and so I think we were pleasantly surprised how well it went.
Once you get into space, now, you're subjected to solar events, as well as cosmic rays, essentially high energy particles that can wreak havoc on your electronics. - We are protected in some ways from this radiation because of the Earth's atmosphere. We live underneath this beautiful blanket, right? But in space, it can create severe damage. You can have something like a bit flip. Zero can become a one, one can become a zero, and these are actually what are called single event upsets. So that's one kind of error, and these are correctable.
The other is total ionization dose, and this is the damage of it being constantly under this radiative environment. And the way we test for this is we take it to this proton beam facility and bombard it directly with these protons. While we are doing this, we actually run actual AI workloads and we see how the errors can affect our training. So our tests have found what is called an SDC or it's called a silent data corruption. This is the first time we have found actually an SDC during a beam test. So we were testing for if the TPU would survive five years of the kind of orbit that we are looking at, and each part has different survival rates and different error rates.
And the TPUs held up remarkably well. - The importance here is that we can leverage the advances in the commercial industry and immediately send those to space instead of waiting for long design cycles to make it space rated. - These are risky projects. Sometimes these things don't work out, but if you are a scientist, you're ready to kind of face that challenge and solve the problems that come along the way, and you might end up with something completely different or new, which is essentially the fun part of working in something like this.
