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Computer Servers 'Stranded' in Space (bbc.com)
A pair of Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers sent up to the International Space Station in August 2017 as an experiment have still not come back to Earth, three months after their intended return. From a report: Together they make up the Spaceborne Computer, a Linux system that has supercomputer processing power. They were sent up to see how durable they would be in space with minimal specialist treatment. After 530 days, they are still working. Their return flight was postponed after a Russian rocket failed in October 2018. HPE senior content architect Adrian Kasbergen said they may return in June 2019 if there is space on a flight but "right now they haven't got a ticket." The company is working with Nasa to be "computer-ready" for the first manned Mars flight, estimated to take place in about 2030. The company is also working with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Shoulda used UPS, not Amazon's own shipping.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Somebody probably wants to inspect the boards, chips and other components for radiation and mechanical damage.
They probably want to study them to see if there has been any damage from radiation or other issues, but leaving them running longer may help them to find more useful information.
redundancy power supply as well as some of the redundant solid-state drives.
For an long mission they need to be hot swap or have say 4 PSU's that only needs one.
For disks maybe an 3-4 disk raid 1 setup.
Backup up disks
FULL RESTORE IMAGES
FULL LIST OF ROOT / ADMIN passwords maybe hard coded ones.
BIOS RECOVERY DISK / USB.
ETC
they need them back to do an tear-down
SpaceX Dragon is going up there real soon with no crew.
Belt it in to an empty seat and bring it back.
teammasters want $2500/hour for space runs! and that is just the workers pay.
And they rarely call to get them back. Unless somebody else needed them....they were on permanent loan.
I am not sure what they are trying to prove with this experiment. The environment inside the space station is hardly any more daunting than sitting on a table in Cupertino. The real issue is when you get above the Van Allen belts and get a few zaps from solar flares.
I am sure they know this, but, also, processors for the space environment are also a perfectly well-known quantity. Analysis alone should get them a very reliable answer on life time, upset rate, etc.
If they don't have BASIC in ROM then are they even worth returning to the earth? Let them become new satellites.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
How much you want to bet those machine got re-purposed as miners or the porn stash?
No good deed goes unpunished.
Running in low Earth orbit won't expose them to nearly as much radiation as they'll get in interplanetary space.
They probably want to study them to see if there has been any damage from radiation or other issues, but leaving them running longer may help them to find more useful information.
That's just what they said about Spirit.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
True, but it's more than at home.
There are room-sized irradiation machines used to sterilize food.
It should not be too hard to set up a test rig here on earth.
Do SSDs use depleted boron-11 as a dopant? That is a cheap and obvious first step to making them rad-hard.
Didn't theFukushima and Chernobyl robots give up this information quite quickly?
Why UNIX?
Probably some old and now obsolete Xeons, not worth recovering, just throw them out.
The point isn't to have a supercomputer in space; it's to test the long term effects of space on modern computer hardware.
The ISS's *built-in* computers run on a late 80s 80386SX processors, which were produced with 1000 nanometer semiconductor technology. The processors on this computer have minimum feature sizes of 45 nm or less, and are thus more likely to be radiation sensitive. The processors for these computers were taken right off the Intel assembly line with no special hardening.
The effect of space operation is particularly of interest in specifying the mission computer for a manned Mars mission where the round-trip time precludes doing many things remotely.
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Is this a common practice in the Uk?
/* No Comment */
Probably ISS isn't the best place where to start practicing compulsive hoarding.
Space qualified hardware is not trivial. In the old days what was qualified would be one or likely two or more generations earlier than current which was a big deal when each generation typically brought significant performance improvements. Nowadays I assume it's more bulk. Still I'd think they'd leave the system up till it stopped working and then schedule to bring it back for analysis.
I believe the hardened hardware is still around a decade old, performance-wise. It's just that performance hasn't changed much in a decade. I do wonder what they do about cooling. You don't have to underclock a modern server processor by much to dispense with the fan, but you still need some airflow over a large surface area heat sink. Maybe they just solved the problems related to shaking/vibration well enough to support a sizable heat sink.
Or of course you can just use mobile components everywhere, but I don't think that's what this payload is. Anyone know?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Well!", said the PHB, "the wings didn't fall off the plane on the first flight, let's not look any closer for stress fractures. Guys, make 10k more of these now"
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
nO. eVERYTHING iS fINE oVER hERE
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
The effect of space operation is particularly of interest in specifying the mission computer for a manned Mars mission
Except that in LEO, the computers are protected by the Earth's magnetic field. Sending COTS parts to Mars would be a bad idea, especially if the crew's life depends on it.
Hoy them out of the airlock.
They'll come down sooner or later.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't think anyone is suggesting non-hardened COTS electronics is a good idea for a Mars mission.
The radiation in LEO is not the same as beyond the van Allen belts, sure, but it's not the same as at the Earth's surface either.
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The radiation in LEO is not the same as beyond the van Allen belts, sure, but it's not the same as at the Earth's surface either.
People keep saying this... has slashdot been overrun by folks applying for bullshit research grants?
"His name was James Damore."
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.zeme... among other sources.
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non-hardened COTS electronics
All COTS is non-hardened.
They must've never worked with NASA before... Anyway the only cargo vehicle that returns to earth is the Dragon and the last one of those to come back was in December, and that was after the possible abandonment scare from the October Proton failure. Plus these sound pretty big so I wouldn't be surprised if they get bumped a couple times to make room for higher-priority items. Somebody mentioned the uncrewed Dragon demo, but if it's not designed for cargo then it can't take it. It wouldn't have the right restraints and SpaceX may not be able to do the CoG estimates that they need. Also the Soyuz has a little bit of space for cargo, but it's usually Russian priority cargo, so I doubt these old servers will make the cut. They'll get them when they get them.
It figures it's running Linux! Take that Windows! :-P
There's probably a beowulf cluster joke in there somewhere too...
Even with a large heatsink, there would need to be fans involved, because heated air wouldn't rise away from the heatsink in microgravity
I do wonder what they do about cooling. You don't have to underclock a modern server processor by much to dispense with the fan, but you still need some airflow over a large surface area heat sink.
What utility is a fan in the vacuum of space? The real solution is not blasting to space a CPU that generates a lot of heat. That means they'll be "space hardened" SPARCs, or PowerPC, ARM, or Pentium grade chips.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Good point! Though it seems there is case airflow through heatsink to the station.
I just wonder about the resiliency of cooling fans after launch - normal components really aren't designed for heavy vibration at multiple gs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not a vacuum system. It runs in the pressured area if the ISS, and can dump heat to the ISS via a heatsink.
The eventual trip to Mars will be similar, I think.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.