This August 14, aboard a Space X supply mission bound for the International Space Station, the first supercomputer was launched into space .
This supercomputer, called the Spaceborne Computer , is part of a year-long experiment conducted by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NASA to run a commercial high-performance computing system (COTS) in space, a milestone never seen before. done.
Spaceborne computer
This experiment will try to verify if the computer can survive the conditions of space for a year, which is how long it would take to reach Mars, which would allow many calculations to be made in situ and not from Earth (which delays sending data both outward and return).
For example, communications from astronauts that were close to Tuesday would take 20 minutes to arrive and 20 minutes to return. Such a long delay in communication would make any field exploration a difficult problem .
The first step, however, is to learn more about how the computer reacts in space. Spaceborne Computer will not only show us what needs to be done to advance computing in space, but it will also spark discoveries about how to improve high-performance computing (HPC) on Earth.