SpaceX Will Deliver The First Supercomputer To The ISS (hpe.com)

Slashdot reader #16,185, Esther Schindler writes: "By NASA's rules, not just any computer can go into space. Their components must be radiation hardened, especially the CPUs," reports HPE Insights. "Otherwise, they tend to fail due to the effects of ionizing radiation. The customized processors undergo years of design work and then more years of testing before they are certified for spaceflight." As a result, the ISS runs the station using two sets of three Command and Control Multiplexer DeMultiplexer computers whose processors are 20MHz Intel 80386SX CPUs, right out of 1988. "The traditional way to radiation-harden a spacecraft computer is to add redundancy to its circuits or by using insulating substrates instead of the usual semiconductor wafers on chips. That's expensive and time consuming. HPE scientists believe that simply slowing down a system in adverse conditions can avoid glitches and keep the computer running."

So, assuming the August 15 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch goes well, there will be a supercomputer headed into space -- using off-the-shelf hardware. Let's see if the idea pans out. "We may discover a set of parameters with which a supercomputer can successfully run for at least a year without errors," says Dr. Mark R. Fernandez, the mission's co-principal investigator for software and SGI's HPC technology officer. "Alternately, one or more components of the system will fail, in which case we will then do the typical failure analysis on Earth. That will let us learn what to change to make the systems more reliable in the future."
The article points out that the New Horizons spacecraft that just flew past Pluto has a 12MHz Mongoose-V CPU, based on the MIPS R3000 CPU. "You may remember its much faster ancestor: the chip that took you on adventures in the original Sony PlayStation, circa 1994."

Comments

So whats with the laptops then?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the ISS webcam when it switches to the interior cam, there's a few laptops (one running Ubuntu) tied to the sides of the walls.

Re: So whats with the laptops then?

[Areyoukiddingme]

I asked at a flight qualification panel about this a few years ago and was told that to date, no cots cpu hardware has experienced either an SEI or had problems due to TID.

I'm not too surprised that lattice displacement damage has been minimal. While the station has been up there for a lot of years now, the laptops in use have been rotated out quite regularly. After all, they started with Thinkpad 700 series, which were 80486s of various flavors. Routine upgrades have been sufficient to avoid total ionizing doses big enough to be noticeable.

I'm astonished to hear that absolutely no COTS digital electronics have ever experienced crash or corruption inducing single event effects (When did they change the acronym from SEE to SEI?). I'd be willing to bet that there have been SEE/SEI crashes, but generations of craptacular Microsoft operating systems have concealed them. It's quite clear from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on board that the station is getting pelted with high energy protons day in and day out, not to mention the heavier stuff that contributes significantly to the radiation exposure astronauts have to keep track of. One of those particles hitting the right transistor will most certainly change the value stored in a DRAM cell, and now that we're talking about billions of cells with a transistor each, that's a lot of targets.

I have to ask, when you mention Beaglebones etc. being on station for years, does that involve years of uptime, or are these things being regularly rebooted? If they're being rebooted, how frequently?

Gamma radiation...

[__aaclcg7560]

Whenever something inexplicable happened while testing a video game, I've always put down "gamma radiation" on the bug report. The developers hated that term but they couldn't explain why it happened either.

Re:but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

At a guess it's because sending data back to earth for processing isn't great when you're a long way away - the latency between Earth and Mars, for example, can get up to about 21 minutes. If your lander has to adjust for local weather systems, or your orbital station needs to make corrections due to local changes in EM fields, or if you're just operating in an environment where you can't predict exactly what conditions you're going to find, you need to do a lot of calculations to correct.

Of course this isn't an issue for the ISS, with a latency shorter than my ping to Google (seriously, my internet sucks). But if we're going to look at landers on Europa, exploring Ganymede etc it'll be easier if we can do some heavy computing on the fly. So test now in a controlled environment, and get it right for when we send stuff on 20 year missions.