The Spaceborne Computer will be carried aloft by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and the first test of its capability is expected to occur around September 4 when scientists on the ISS boot up the device. The computer was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.
Dr. Eng Lim Goh, Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer of SGI at HPE (HPE acquired SGI, the former Silicon Graphics, Inc., a year ago for $275 million) is the principal investigator on this project. The goal of the experiment is to analyze "if high performance computing hardware, with no hardware customization or modification, can survive and operate in outer space conditions" for an entire year, according to TechCrunch. Its one-year operation is created to match the time it would take for a spacecraft to travel from the Earth to Mars and back.
The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are about to welcome a new member in their midst next week. HPE announced the work Friday.
Some computers destined for space have special shielding and other protection, but not this one. Ruggedizing and rad-hardening hardware is pretty expensive, hence why boffins want to find out how harsh space will really will be for off-the-shelf and relatively cheap computers.
This won't be the case with HPE's Spaceborne, which is constructed of standard, openly available hardware but loaded with custom software that can more easily be replaced, patched, maintained and otherwise tweaked as needed. It doesn't need the full rugged treatment partly because it's meant to be used for only a year; after that, its rack design (also new to the ISS) means it can be easily swapped out for a new and improved model.
"It's a very exciting time in space flight", Jackson said.
And that's the kind of reliability that could benefit us even here on Earth. It will have mirror systems on the ground as backup. Earth is protected against this radiation by magnetic fields but the further you go into space, the more exposed you become to it. Jackson said that while the ISS is shielded to a degree, "radiation events" do occur and the test will show whether the computer's software is able to detect radiation and protect itself from it by, for example, slowing down its operations.
"Mars astronauts won't have near-instant access to high performance computing like those in low-earth orbit do - on average, the red planet is 26 light minutes round-trip away". Such a long communication lag would make any on-the-ground exploration challenging and potentially unsafe if astronauts are met with any mission-critical scenarios that they're not able to solve themselves, Andreoli said.
The vision, he explains, is to allow astronauts to order computers shortly before a mission, load them up with the required software and blast off.
The hope of this experiment will prove that current technologies can be deployed in the quickest manner possible without the need to wait for Nasa engineers to modify hardware to make them space-proof.
The Spaceborne Computer, which is Linux-based, will be the most powerful computer sent into space as it has a roughly 1 teraflop computing speed.
After a successful launch, Fernandez and his team will determine if the "Spaceborne Computer" will work in space.
NASA requires any approved system to be "ruggedised" to deal with radiation, solar flares, subatomic particles, unstable electrical power and irregular cooling.
Dr. Eng Lim Goh, Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer of SGI at HPE (HPE acquired SGI, the former Silicon Graphics, Inc., a year ago for $275 million) is the principal investigator on this project. The goal of the experiment is to analyze "if high performance computing hardware, with no hardware customization or modification, can survive and operate in outer space conditions" for an entire year, according to TechCrunch. Its one-year operation is created to match the time it would take for a spacecraft to travel from the Earth to Mars and back.
The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are about to welcome a new member in their midst next week. HPE announced the work Friday.
Some computers destined for space have special shielding and other protection, but not this one. Ruggedizing and rad-hardening hardware is pretty expensive, hence why boffins want to find out how harsh space will really will be for off-the-shelf and relatively cheap computers.
This won't be the case with HPE's Spaceborne, which is constructed of standard, openly available hardware but loaded with custom software that can more easily be replaced, patched, maintained and otherwise tweaked as needed. It doesn't need the full rugged treatment partly because it's meant to be used for only a year; after that, its rack design (also new to the ISS) means it can be easily swapped out for a new and improved model.
"It's a very exciting time in space flight", Jackson said.
And that's the kind of reliability that could benefit us even here on Earth. It will have mirror systems on the ground as backup. Earth is protected against this radiation by magnetic fields but the further you go into space, the more exposed you become to it. Jackson said that while the ISS is shielded to a degree, "radiation events" do occur and the test will show whether the computer's software is able to detect radiation and protect itself from it by, for example, slowing down its operations.
"Mars astronauts won't have near-instant access to high performance computing like those in low-earth orbit do - on average, the red planet is 26 light minutes round-trip away". Such a long communication lag would make any on-the-ground exploration challenging and potentially unsafe if astronauts are met with any mission-critical scenarios that they're not able to solve themselves, Andreoli said.
The vision, he explains, is to allow astronauts to order computers shortly before a mission, load them up with the required software and blast off.
The hope of this experiment will prove that current technologies can be deployed in the quickest manner possible without the need to wait for Nasa engineers to modify hardware to make them space-proof.
The Spaceborne Computer, which is Linux-based, will be the most powerful computer sent into space as it has a roughly 1 teraflop computing speed.
After a successful launch, Fernandez and his team will determine if the "Spaceborne Computer" will work in space.
NASA requires any approved system to be "ruggedised" to deal with radiation, solar flares, subatomic particles, unstable electrical power and irregular cooling.