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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."
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."
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.
is how Skynet begins.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
latency is my best guess
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The part you seemed to have missed is: This is an experiment to learn whether an alternative approach to hardening can be developed. If it's successful, the benefits would be obvious.
Experiments are the raison d'etre for the ISS... so why is this a problem?
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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.
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.
Go see it for yourself http://www.spacex.com/webcast
I'd instead go with a RAIA -- a horde of off-the-shelf ARMs. Within the power budget of a single 20MHz 80386 you can fit nine 2GHz SoCs. Have them vote -- there's no way every single of them gets hit by a ray within a time slice. Periodically, resync their memory (especially when the vote disagrees). A 2GHz machine can take quite an overhead while doing the work previously done by a 20MHz one...
This assumes the 386 was alone -- it was at least doubled or tripled. So if you don't need 18x or 27x redundancy, you can do something else with the extra power.
But let's assume you do want that 27x redundancy. It's still a two orders of magnitude speed boost, and that's assuming same speed clock-to-clock. Which is wrong, as 386 timings were downright scary. Especially in floating point, with a hundred or more clock cycles per instruction. Modern ARM on the other hand includes a vectorized FPU...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I think it must be something missing in the article / summary - I don't understand how running a chip slower than design is going to protect against SEUs.SEUs don't have anything to do with the clock rate, but only about the energy levels required to flip a bit.
TFA does mention something about a "software approach" but I'm not certain what that would be, unless it is something like running every computation twice to see if you get the same result both times - which is either going to mean you need twice the equipment or run at half speed.
But... now that I think about it, that might still be a win, because hardened chips run a fair bit slower than half speed at a cost a fair bit more than twice as much...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
The approach is interesting, but putting it in the ISS is only slightly more demanding than putting it on your desk. Both remain well under the protection of the Van Allen belts. The real test is out beyond the Van Allen belts where the radiation really gets tough.
Who needs radiation hardening? Just send a Proliant rack server up there and call it good! That's why we're SpaceX and they're luddites!
Unless I've missed something and HPE has been sold to him, Elon Musk is just the owner of the company that will deliver this computer to the ISS. He did not design the experiment.
Why not do the heavy computing down here on the ground, where it is so much easier?
Bandwidth. ISS has 3 megabit upstream, 10 megabit downstream. Yes, megabit, not gigabit. And that's a massive upgrade over what it had for years, which was 2400 baud. There's any number of science experiments people would like to run that would benefit from beefy local processing handling large amounts of data. So much data that neither transmitting it off station nor storing it and physically transporting it off station is currently feasible. The bandwidth isn't available or the storage is too expensive.
That may change in the 2020s. I'd bet a pizza that SpaceX will be including upward-facing antennas in their satellites, not just Earthward-facing, in order to talk to their own rockets at high bandwidth regardless of where they are in their trajectories. Still, it's going to be quite some time before that option exists, so experiments to determine the feasibility of local processing are worth conducting.
Not impressive as my 4 year old i7 has 120,000,000 instructions per second. This is around 8 times more which is a new desktop for a few thousand. Also my GPU which is a semi crappy RX 470 can easily do 5 trillion operations per second no problem.
http://saveie6.com/
Why do they need a supercomputer up there?
Could not they compute in the cloud like the rest of us?
Or did they cut the cable and do not have internet anymore?
Or simply are they just above it?
Oh...wait...
But seriously?
4wdloop
Because they want to test something for Mars. Mars is around 10 minute latency spike at the speed of light so transmitting the data in large sets and quickly is impracticable.
http://saveie6.com/
By the way, do you still have the wagon? I saw one driving on I-5 the other day and assumed it was you.
I do still have the wagon! It mainly serves to get me from my house to the local Sounder station, but occasionally I still take it on I-5. I prefer to avoid freeways when I can, though.
It's been a very reliable car, but it's definitely showing its age... I'm probably going to finally retire it for something else before the end of the year. I'll probably be unreasonably sad when that day comes, though.
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I was told years ago, when I was in University, that a "Supercomputer" had a clock speed of 200MHz - with the understanding it was really 200 MIPs/FLOPs.
This sounds like a good step forward and a significant improvement on the AP100s that were on the first shuttles and had a clock rate of 480kHz (and, IIRC, 1.5MByte of ROM ("ROS" in IBM-speak) and 500kByte of SRAM).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
A single computer with redundancy in the OS gets killed by a single well-placed ray. On the other hand, the redundant ARM array consists of physically separate machines, even if one gets permanently fried others will keep running. And I picked ARM because it offers tiny power draw while delivering good performance. The power budget of a deep-space craft is really tight.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
There's any number of science experiments people would like to run that would benefit from beefy local processing handling large amounts of data.
Care to share any of them?
Twice lets you know if something isn't working, which sometimes is enough. You only need triple redundancy when you have to know the correct answer.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I believe I might have seen it too. I think it looks a little like this...http://genedorr.com/patches/images/Gemini/Ge05_Recovery_detail.jpg
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Nah, mine doesn't have the spoke wheels. :-P
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It's the MacArthur principle. Take credit for whatever is going so long as you are somewhere sort of near where it is happening.
Unless I've missed something, Elon Musk is not trying to take credit for this experiment.
Triple redundancy is what you want if you're running the operations in parallel and looking for consensus. If you're running them in series, you run them twice and only repeat if the two results don't match. The chance of two SEUs happening that disrupt the same operation in the same way, twice in a row is very unlikely.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Why put a supercomputer up there? Is the bandwidth available not enough to send a dataset to Earth, process it, and send it back? Or are the calculations needed to keep the ISS running that complex?
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
8088's were 1980. 286's came out in the mid-eighties. 386's were brand new and *expensive* by '87/88. Therefore, 386 is *not* 1980.
I find it interesting that this project will make use of Red Hat 6.8 to complete the COTS picture.
For other needs, the software suite has to show a high level of reliability as well. Think along the lines of DO-178* (safety/mission critical) requirements
Witness efforts with QuickSAT/XEN ( https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearc... ) and the work from Victor with GalacticSky ( http://www.galacticsky.net/ )