Without a doubt the astronauts of the International Space Station They have to be happy and worried in equal parts, on the one hand, they will receive a new supercomputer that has been tested on the ground for many years so that nothing can fail once it reaches space, something that will surely give them great illusion, on the contrary, it is cause for concern as this will have to finish being mounted in space and located in the correct place.
To carry out the design, manufacturing, assembly and testing work, we have relied on good work and above all on the experience of the engineers and technicians of HP Enterprise, company that has been in charge of manufacturing the supercomputer that today we know by the name of Spaceborne computer, a model that will be in charge from next week to carry out certain calculations with which to determine to what extent it may or may not be possible to work with this type of technology in space.
SpaceX will be in charge of taking the supercomputer from Earth to the International Space Station
As expected, in the idea of sending a supercomputer to the International Space Station we found the NASANot for nothing has the United States Space Agency been and, as it has shown, will be of great importance in the development of computational technology during the next few years in space.
On the other hand, for the work of bringing the supercomputer manufactured by HP Enterprise to the International Space Station, they have relied on SpaceX. For its part, the latter has estimated as a launch point on Earth for this rocket nothing less than the famous base that it has at Cape Canaveral.
Year after year the need to process huge amounts of data in space grows
Why equip the International Space Station with a computer of these characteristics? The idea happens in a growing need that NASA has, an agency that little by little has been overwhelmed by the amount of data related to space that they have to process, data that until now could not be carried out in space because it had not been possible to develop an ideal solution capable of carrying out this task.
On the other hand, as you surely know, the idea that both NASA and other agencies worldwide have is to carry out missions that are increasingly remote from our planet, which in turn requires more advanced computers capable of operating in space, which will have to take charge, when the time comes, to process them completely autonomously since we have to take into account the difficulty of sending them to Earth and wait for a response result.
Taking into account the latter, we can refer to a comment made by the HP Enterprise:
The experiment with the Spaceborn Computer will not only show us what needs to be done in terms of advanced computing in space, it will also provide insights into how to improve the performance of technology on Earth and potentially affect other areas of technological innovation.
The hardware characteristics of the supercomputer that will be sent to the International Space Station are unknown
Regarding the technical characteristics that this supercomputer can offer and that will finally be deployed on the International Space Station, we can speak of a terminal equipped with a fully customized version of the Linux operating system as well as software developed by HP Enterprise itself at the request of NASA capable of adapting to environmental conditions, varying and producing the necessary adjustments to ensure that the supercomputer can function optimally at all times.
Before concluding, highlight something that has caught my attention. On the one hand, comment that a specific water cooling system for this supercomputer in particular taking into account the work to be carried out and the environment and its conditions or the fact that nothing has been commented on the hardware it mounts, a measure that has surely been taken to avoid debates as to whether it is more or less novel.